The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence

Following up on my previous reflection on finding Christ in the church—which is to say, in the Eucharist—I want to ask four questions in this post:

1. Is every attempt at celebrating the Eucharist valid—that is, just in virtue of making the attempt?

2. If not, then what constitutes eucharistic validity?

3. What is the relationship between the ritual ceremonial features of eucharistic celebration and a given tradition’s eucharistic doctrine?

4. Is it in any way wrong—offensive, unkind, or uncharitable—to suggest that those traditions and churches that deny the real presence in their celebrations of the Eucharist are in fact correct about their own celebrations, if not about others’?

The first question is easily answered: No. That is, merely the desire to celebrate the Eucharist is not and could never be sufficient as a criterion for valid celebration. I am not aware of any Christian tradition that says so; it is ecumenical and perhaps unanimous in church history that more is required than the sheer intention to do it right. You’ve also got to, you know, do it right.

How to do it right, though? This second question raises a whole host of further questions. I like to put these questions to my ministry majors, most of whom come from non-denominational Evangelical backgrounds. They include but are not limited to:

• Who can celebrate, that is, preside at the Supper?

• Is ordination a condition of celebrating? Is baptism? Is belief in Christ?

• What elements must be used?

• What prayers, if any, must be prayed?

• What Scriptures, if any, must be read?

• What petitions, if any, must be made?

• What invocations, if any, must be uttered?

I have students who, on first blush, are willing to say that anyone may preside, any elements may be used, and no prayers or Scriptures or other ritual prescriptions are either necessary or sufficient for the meal to be validly celebrated. I know adult Christians and pastors who agree. (Above I said I knew of no Christian traditions that claimed such a thing; I know plenty of individuals who do!) Let’s say that such a position is one pole on the continuum.

The other pole is high catholic ecclesial traditions. For these, a valid Eucharist must be celebrated by a validly ordained priest—ordained, that is, by a bishop in succession from the apostles—using only precise elements (fermented wine and either leavened or unleavened bread) and following specific liturgical ritual rubrics, which require certain Scriptures, prayers, and invocations to be performed as components of a larger ritual complex, wherein symbolic deeds are just as important as the words spoken.

Naturally, a number of approaches to eucharistic celebration lie along the spectrum between these poles. You will notice, on a moment’s reflection, that the “higher” a tradition’s doctrine of what occurs in the Eucharist, the “higher” its ritual celebration of the meal. That is, the closer you are to affirming the real presence or transubstantiation, the more likely you are to seeing ordination, liturgical rubrics, and carefully orchestrated rituals as the most fitting (and, indeed, necessary) manner of celebrating the Supper. And vice versa: the further you are from affirming the real presence, the less ceremony attending your celebration of the ritual—as well as, in literal terms, the frequency with which you celebrate it, and the amount of time you set aside in public worship in order to do so.

To my third question, then, consider the following image:

This is my rough-and-ready plot graph meant to illustrate the trend I have in mind, namely, that eucharistic doctrine and ceremony are yoked together: the more of one, the more of the other; the less of one, the less of the other.

Notice that I’ve created four quadrants, and that two of them are empty. There simply aren’t large-scale Christian denominations or ecclesial traditions marked by (#1) high eucharistic ceremony wedded to low eucharistic doctrine or (#3) high eucharistic doctrine wedded to low eucharistic ceremony. It’s easy to understand why. If you believe that in this sacramental meal the living Christ, risen from the dead and reigning from heaven, is bodily present under the sign of bread and wine, then as a matter of course you will restrict its celebration to certain people (and not others), under certain conditions (and not others), by means of certain specified rituals (and not others).

On the other hand, if you believe that nothing happens to the elements—indeed, if you believe that the meal, while instituted by Jesus and important to observe, neither communicates grace to participants nor, in terms of divine action or presence, serves as the site of anything unique by comparison to other Christian practices like prayer, singing, and reading Scripture—then you will be less anxious to prescribe the who, the what, and the how of the meal’s celebration. At the outer limits, a populist form of public worship underwritten by a democratized priesthood of all believers will ultimately result in no rituals, conditions, or criteria whatsoever for the celebration of the Supper. Not only can anyone do it; they can do it whenever and wherever and however they please.

As I wrote in my first post, this is neither caricature nor slander. I’ve known people and churches that use cupcakes and soda or Cheez-its and apple juice. As I noted in the spring of 2020, the great question facing “low” churches—not all churches, mind you, for the majority of churches require at least an ordained pastor and a gathering of believers in person—was whether to encourage or discourage believers from self-administering Communion under lockdown. Alas, nearly all such congregations not only encouraged self-administration and “private celebration” (sine populo!) but presupposed without question that to do so was both possible and salutary.

For this reason, among others, my students (including the future ministers among them) take for granted that I, a layperson alone at home, streaming Sunday worship from my couch or bed, may and ought to rummage around in my pantry for plausibly suitable elements to administer to myself while the people on my laptop screen celebrate the Supper. Perhaps this strikes you as a beautiful adaptation of God’s people to the digital age, whether in extremis (under conditions of a global pandemic) or in ordinary circumstances. Either way, that is not how it strikes me, nor how it would have struck any premodern Christian, including Protestants.

Be that as it may, the point here is that “low” eucharistic doctrine underlies this “low” approach to celebration. And that doctrine teaches: nothing happens. That is, there is no eucharistic miracle, there is no consecration, there is no real presence, there is no transubstantiation. These are symbols; not less, but also not more. God instituted these symbols and therefore they are important in the life of the church. But they are not sacramental in the superstitious sense; they are not (eyes roll, hands wave) the body and blood of Christ; they are not changed. They are food and drink and remain so. Hence the relaxed approach to their observance.

We come, then, to the last of my four questions. Is it unbecoming to agree with churches that deny the real presence that their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper are merely symbolic? I do not see how it is. It is an odd sort of imposition to inform Christian traditions that explicitly reject the doctrine of eucharistic change that God, in spite of their states belief and practice, changes the elements anyway. They don’t ask him to, and they don’t believe he does it. Even if God were willing to grant their petition, surely they have to ask?

I hope my tone doesn’t sound facetious. It’s anything but. When I talk about the theology of the Eucharist with low-church folks a few things tend to occur, usually in conjunction:

1. General reaffirmed agreement about the propriety of “low” eucharistic ceremony, i.e., approval of few or no restrictions on who can celebrate or how.

2. General openness toward a “higher” view of eucharistic doctrine, up to and including a full-bore Lutheran or Orthodox or Catholic view of the real presence. (John 6 all by itself does a lot of work here.)

3. A wary sense of unease or offense at the notion that #1 and #2 don’t or can’t go together, especially the implication (logically entailed) that churches whose teaching and practice overtly repudiate the real presence do not enjoy the real presence in their eucharistic celebrations.

4. A vague and sometimes debilitating anxiety that a believer in quadrant #4 who wants the real presence may need to join a tradition in quadrant #2 to find it.

To be clear, the first two of these come joined at the hip, and then the next two become options at a kind of ecclesial-spiritual-doctrinal fork in the road. Because the fourth option is so existentially threatening, the third is more common; but then, most people, being honest with themselves, can admit the discrepancy that lies at its heart. Which leaves them stuck if number four is a nonstarter.

The upshot of all this, for my purposes in this post, is fourfold.

First, not everyone believes in the real presence. It is therefore not an unkindness, either from a “low” or from a “high” perspective, to suggest that (at a minimum) certain attempts at celebrating the Lord’s Supper do not enjoy or realize the real presence. Once, years ago, I was attending a church in which the Supper was being celebrated. Something was said about the body and blood of Christ. A child near me (not mine) asked a minister near him whether the bread and cup really were Jesus’s body and blood. She laughed and told him, “No, it’s just crackers and grape juice.”

(Old Flannery is turning over in her grave.)

Second, doctrine and practice go together. Both theologically and practically, “high” doctrine (=real presence) requires “high” ceremony (=ordination, rubrics, prayers, etc.). Likewise “low” doctrine always and everywhere involves “low” ceremony. This is a matter of description and prescription alike: the one because the other. Christian division makes the connection here crystal clear; no one is in disagreement about the meta-point, only about which quadrant is the right one.

Third, low-church traditions cannot bootstrap themselves into “high” eucharistic doctrine. It can’t be done. To move from memorialism to real presence necessitates massive doctrinal, liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological transformation: in effect, a comprehensive reversal of the many Christian revolutions initiated in the sixteenth century. To do so would mean moving wholesale from quadrant #4 to quadrant #2. But that would be to “revert” from low to high, from biblicist to confessional, from congregationalist to episcopal, from evangelical to catholic. It would be to change traditions. Traditions don’t change in that way, though. Either they die or they (their members) join some other, preexisting tradition. There’s no third way here.

Fourth, subjective desire alone cannot change the elements. I’ve known more than a few folks, whether friends or students, who accept what I’ve laid out here yet who remain dissatisfied—stuck in the third “option” I outlined above. What they resolve to do is cut the Gordian knot through sheer force of will. That is, they choose to believe, in spite of their church’s teaching and practice, that the elements of the Supper in which they partake are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Even though no rituals are observed, even though relevant prayers are not offered, even though anyone at all might be presiding, even though the person presiding might say out loud that these are nothing more than symbols—nevertheless, the individual in question chooses to believe that, at least for him or her, the elements have been consecrated; that they communicate grace; that in them Christ himself is really and truly present: body, blood, soul, divinity.

There is a grave irony in this posture, understandable though it may be at the emotional level. It is a kind of private magic. It turns the old Protestant accusation against the Mass (“hocus pocus,” hoc est corpus meum) on its head. I alone, in the confines of my own skull, have the power, through nothing but mental intention, to make (an attempt at observing) the Lord’s Supper into a valid celebration of the blessed sacrament of Christ’s real presence—at least for me, the individual communicant.

Surely I am not alone in wanting to avoid this posture at all costs. No such power exists. Either God in Christ instituted the Eucharist to be the perpetual sacrament of his real presence, his body and blood, or he did not. Either the meal rightly celebrated makes Christ available in that way or it does not. Either we celebrate it accordingly or we do not.

Regardless of one’s answer (or the answer), as the illustration earlier showed, there really isn’t a middle ground. The church is the locus of this marriage of doctrine and practice, not the individual. Which is why, in my original post, I framed the whole matter with a single question phrased in two ways: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist? Each of which turns out to be synonymous and therefore convertible with a third question that, for so many pilgrims of faith, governs both: Where can I find the church, the body and bride of Christ?

As I insisted there, so I repeat now: It’s a worthwhile question, one of the most important you can ever ask in this life. Even in the confusions of ecclesial division and brokenness, it’s worth pursuing with the utmost seriousness.

My latest: an essay and response in Restoration Quarterly

An essay of mine is featured in the latest issue of Restoration Quarterly (66:3). In fact, the entire issue is organized around it. Let me give a little back story.

Two years ago on the blog I wrote a series of reflections on the past, present, and future of churches of Christ. They got a lot of traction around this neck of the woods, and James Thompson, the editor of RQ, asked me to synthesize and elaborate the posts into a single essay. The result is called “Churches of Christ: Once Catholic, Now Evangelical” (pp. 133–44). It’s preceded by a brief reflection by Thompson on the “almost Catholic” ecclesiology of churches of Christ (pp. 129–32), then followed by three replies:

• “A Response to Brad East” by Wendell Willis (pp. 145–51)

• “Churches of Christ: Always Evangelical, Still Catholic” by John Mark Hicks (pp. 152–58)

• “A Response to Brad East” by Paul Watson (pp. 159–62)

I in turn wrote a response to the responses (pp. 163–69). All around a good time was had by all. My response is followed by a proper scholarly article on the New Testament (authored, again, by Thompson), then book reviews. As it happens, a review of my own book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, is the first of this section.

It sort of feels like the Brad East Issue. I’m honored, humbled, and a little embarrassed.

Nevertheless it was a pleasure to engage such serious and pressing issues in a public forum with such thoughtful and generous thinkers and churchmen. My only regret is that while RQ does have a website it doesn’t have an obvious or convenient way to access current issues online or in digital form. Back issues are catalogued in ATLA but this one won’t be there for a while, at least from what I can tell.

I’m not in a position to share the whole issue with folks, but if you email me, I’d be willing to share a PDF of my essay and response. I’ll be curious to hear what folks make of my case, both regarding the absorption of churches of Christ by and into American Evangelicalism and regarding the precipitous institutional decline of the movement. The tone of the pieces isn’t doom and gloom, but it is quite sober and, if readers take it seriously, sobering. Which it should be, if I’m right.

Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?

I take these two questions to be (a) the most urgent theological questions one can ask and (b) synonymous. They came to mind as I read Jeff Reimer’s essay published in Comment last year, titled “How Not to Be a Schismatic.”

That was more than eight months ago, and for eight months I’ve been working up the nerve to read the essay. I expected it to be painful, and it was. It was like looking in a mirror. I knew Jeff’s wilderness wanderings would be similar to my own, and I frankly didn’t want to put myself through the ringer.

I did, though, and the first thing to say is that the essay is beautiful. I can’t wait to assign it to students and share it with friends. It puts into words so much that so many people I know have gone through or are currently going through. It’s a melancholy story of genuine spiritual suffering, even if he wouldn’t want to put it that way. It is a special kind of mental and emotional torture not to know where you are meant to be and to feel ecclesially homeless as a result.

The essay is also self-critical and mordantly funny; the opening bit is pitch perfect. How many young (now approaching middle age) men with a dash of theological education does Jeff speak for? Sometimes it feels like most of us, though I know that can’t be true.

Here’s the one and only critical or unpersuaded question I want to put to the essay, sourced in the one and only unsatisfied reaction I had to it.

Jeff and I agree about the blessed sacrament. The Eucharist not only communicates grace to the baptized, it is the fount and apex of the faith. It is the heart of the liturgy. It is where Christ meets us, body and soul, in the flesh and blood of his real presence.

Jeff’s journey, like so many others, was about “finding the right church.” He ended up arriving at an uncomfortable Protestant position: in this life, there is no “right” church to find; that’s a matter of hope for the next life. So he comes round full circle, remaining in an evangelical Protestant congregation/tradition because, in the end, he just wants Jesus, and he can’t expect a historical institution run by human beings to be perfect.

Jeff is right to want Jesus. The question is where to find him. And the turn in the final part of the essay seems to me to beg the relevant question. This question is put one of two ways, as the title of this post has it: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the sacrament of his body and blood? No Christian believes the answer is “anywhere you want.” Jeff doesn’t think that, nor do I. The answer also can’t be “wherever people say they have Jesus.” There are communities that truly believe they are a church but aren’t. Indeed, and by the same token, there are communities that sincerely mean to celebrate the Lord’s Supper but fail to do so.

Don’t suppose that I’m representing either sectarian or Catholic views here. This is a matter of ecumenical consensus. Ask yourself: What constitutes a faithful or successful celebration of the Eucharist? Are there any minimum conditions to be met? If there are—and it should go without saying that there are—I can point you to communities that call themselves churches that fail to meet them. Communities that celebrate without wine, or without unleavened bread, or without bread at all, or without any thought at all about the elements, or without an ordained celebrant, or without prayers, or without Scriptures, or without any ritual component whatsoever. Convert the disjunctives to conjunctions: I know of a mainstream church that invited an unbaptized non-Christian to “lead” the Supper. I’ve been present for one in which the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken, the cross went unmentioned, Scripture wasn’t read, and no prayer was offered. In all of these occasions, it hardly needs adding, the notion of the real presence was and is explicitly rejected, even laughed at and mocked.

Am I really supposed to believe that a “cupcake and Mountain Dew” Lord’s Supper, administered by oneself to oneself while home alone streaming Hillsong, is the genuine article? The question answers itself. There are failed attempts at Holy Communion. There are false churches. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know that Jeff agrees with me on this. But I find that most of us—friends, colleagues, pastors, theologians—need the reminder. To say “I’ll stay where I am, because all I want is Jesus, to be fed by his body and blood” is already to presume that Jesus can be found “where I am” and that “his body and blood” are there with him, too. But for many, perhaps most, wayfarers today, that is the very question they are wondering: they don’t know the answer prior to investigating it. They aren’t trying to find the perfect church or even the “one true” church to the exclusion of all others. They just want Jesus. They therefore want to be confident that the meal they are joining is in fact the Eucharist, not a failed attempt—and since we’ve established that attempting the meal is not the same as successfully celebrating it, this is a legitimate desire that should not only be affirmed but should be able, in principle, to be fulfilled. Not with eschatological rest, but with a lack of simmering anxiety, a measure of peace that puts one’s pestering worries to bed for good.

In other words, the ecclesial journey narrated by Jeff is not an integralist fever dream, not limited to shouting commenters on Protestant apologists’ YouTube videos or to Orthodox theo bros convinced that Saint Luke was the first iconographer. Nor is it the purview merely of guys like us, theologically trained eggheads and liturgical devotees. It’s the journey of every single Christian on earth. Not to find the heavenly Jerusalem here below. Not to rest serenely in the arms of Mother Church, spotless and faultless and utterly pure and benign in all her ministrations and dogmas. Jeff is right to spurn such quests as bound to result in failure, denial, or a schismatic, sectarian spirit—wherever one lands.

No, the proper and faithful quest is to find, in one’s actual neighborhood or town, a gathering of the living body of the living Christ. You can’t have one without the other; you must have both. And since there are plenty of dead ecclesial bodies around pretending to a vitality they lack—corpses posing as Christ’s body when they have no life in them—the quest is at once necessary and universal. It belongs to all of us. Granted, it may sow doubt where there was none before: wondering, now, whether one’s church is legitimate, whether its Eucharist is valid. But it’s better than living in ignorance of the truth.

I for one want an answer to that question. I don’t expect to rest until I find it.

Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?

CoC: coda

A wee postscript to the series of posts these last few weeks about the churches of Christ (a topic about which I have almost never written!), based on some conversations with friends and colleagues.

1. I trust it is clear that, when I talk about the “catholic” part of CoC DNA, I’m not suggesting that churches of Christ are, or are in any way close to being, Roman Catholic. I take the point of the analogy to be the observation of what is “like” between two entities that are very much “unlike.” The term “catholic” with a lower-case “c” is something of a technical term in my own writing and elsewhere. It denotes, not the church whose head is the bishop of Rome, but the larger phalanx of historic communions that trace their history back through the middle ages to the church fathers and apostles; whose governing structure is episcopal, that is, a succession of bishops; whose sacred tradition bears real and lasting authority; whose preeminent post-biblical authorities are the creeds and dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils; whose liturgy is sacramental and finds its consummation in the celebration of the Eucharist; etc. The communions thus referred to include not only Rome and the Eastern Orthodox but also the non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, not to mention (in my view) the global Anglican communion. It is a certain doctrinal and sacramental sensibility, a latent sense of the centrality of the church, the efficacy of her sacramental ministrations, and the vocation to universal holiness, among other things, that one finds in common between these communions and, I argue, the churches of Christ.

2. What one does not find in the latter is easily stated: a centralized hierarchy, bishops, creeds, dogmas, councils, sacred tradition, church history, saints, icons, martyrs, feast days, a formal liturgical rite, a church calendar, organs of authority beyond the local church, a formal act of canonization (just who did decide what was included in the Bible for Stone-Campbellites, I wonder?), and much more besides. In this respect churches of Christ very much resemble their evangelical cousins, governed as they are by a locally elected group of elders, centered on the exclusive authority of Scripture, with no substantive doctrinal or sacramental connection to any other church, any other time period, any other teaching apart from what any one congregation judges worthy of and demanded by the canonical texts. Lacking holy orders, lacking any authoritative tradition, CoC polity and practice are decidedly biblicist and congregationalist, thereby standing in a long line of American religious piety. This is why, though CoC-ers have always repudiated Catholics as beyond the pale, their real animus has been reserved for Baptists and other evangelicals, who are just close enough to be almost-saved, but just wrong enough to be not-saved. You argue with those you have the most in common with, after all. Hence two centuries of CoC–Baptist bickering and debate. (Hence, too, the more or less total cessation of the same in recent years.)

3. Along those lines, I neglected to mention social, cultural, or political factors in the evangelicalization of churches of Christ. I alluded to a more recent one in the third post, regarding tribal affiliation and political realignment. Another major factor is the ongoing de-Christianization of the public square and the nation as a whole. Note well: This is a descriptive claim; it is neither celebration nor lament, nor still a judgment on the quality of American culture or politics when its Christian identity was at high tide. A civilization might be Christian in the sense that (for example) the Bible suffuses its rhetoric and cultural products, its laws and policy debates, its education and self-understanding. That doesn’t tell us anything of the quality of such saturation, i.e., whether anyone, much less a majority, follows faithfully the way of Christ.

In any event, the apex of Christian confidence and ecclesial power in America was the 1960s, and since then it has suffered one long sustained decline. This is relevant to the CoC/evangelical story because the context in which American churches find themselves makes an enormous difference to how they approach both their own mission and their relationship to other Christian traditions. When (it feels like) everyone in America is a Christian, then a particular church has the luxury to say, and to mean, that every other church is wrong, and it alone is right. When (it feels like) barely anyone in America is Christian anymore, and the churches are at best hemorrhaging members, at worse under cultural and political assault, then that luxury is gone. The CoC-er is stuck in the foxhole with his Baptist brother, and obviously the latter is a fellow believer (if still in error about one or two things…); what matters now is survival, not doctrinal purity. This sort of martial rapprochement is evident in the 1994 statement in First Things by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The same dynamic on display there is evident, in microcosm, in churches of Christ beginning to trend evangelical around the same time.

4. One thing I left out in my series of posts is the liberal mainline. That term refers to what once constituted the “mainstream” Protestant establishment in America (the types who were on top in the ’60s): Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists, to list only the big guns. One hears less of them these days, outside of certain enclaves and seminaries, because their numbers have, in the last half century, decreased by the millions. They have neither the political power nor the cultural capital they exercised from the time of the Founding through the Civil Rights Movement. It was to some extent from the American mainline that the Stone-Campbell movement both arose and rebelled, in the beginning. It just so happened that, instead of looking like their Great Awakening peers, Stone-Campbellites followed their restorationist hermeneutic to prioritize different texts, generate different readings, and arrive at different conclusions as to the purpose and fundamental patterns of corporate Christian life. Which, in turn, produced what I have been calling a sort of “catholic” ecclesiology and sacramentology by comparison to typical American evangelicalism.

Be that as it may, what of the mainline today vis-à-vis churches of Christ? I’m inclined to say there is no “vis-à-vis” to speak of, with one exception. As I wrote originally, in my experience there are three types of CoC-er today:

1. Someone satisfied with the old-time, if declining, CoC style;

2. Someone happy to be/come evangelical (whether by leaving the CoC or by remaining in a CoC that is, or is in process of becoming, evangelical);

3. Someone desirous of catholic tradition, liturgy, and practice.

The third group, as I said, consists mostly of folks who’ve earned graduate degrees, especially in a theological discipline. But I inadvertently left out a fourth group, which partially overlaps with the third:

4. Someone drawn to the Protestant liberal mainline.

The force of that “drawn” comes in a few flavors. First, and most prominently, women raised in churches of Christ who, discerning a call to ministry, end up leaving their tradition of origin and serving a mainline denomination as ordained pastors. Second, seminarians and ministers who, remaining in churches of Christ, appreciate aspects of catholic tradition but, at the same time, are socially and politically progressive. Third, the churches of those selfsame ministers (and lay leaders) that, over time and through their leadership, come to resemble neither the CoC nor catholic practice but the liberal mainline instead.

I’m most intrigued by this last group, and I’m glad a colleague pointed it out. So far as I can tell, actual ministers in churches of Christ do not really encompass the “catholic” option canvassed in my earlier posts. Rather, they include (1) true-blue CoC-ers, (2) normie evangelicals, and (3) liberal mainliners. Think of these categories in practical terms: Where would a minister from each group go if his or her church did not exist? I mean: If a CoC was not there to be attended? Answer:

• Minister #1 would be, and would feel, ecclesially homeless (and thus would probably start a house church!);

• Minister #2 would (without a second’s thought) go to the nearest non-denom Bible/community church;

• Minister #3 would (without missing a beat) join the Methodists or Episcopalians down the street.

Usually, you can tell which group a minister belongs to pretty easily. And the interesting thing is, you can often tell by just looking at what his or her church looks like, because the direction in which the church is headed follows closely what the minister views as the ideal. Indeed, conflict arises precisely when the ecclesial vision of a minister or ministry staff and that of an eldership are at loggerheads. If one aspires to the liberal mainline and the other to evangelicalism—not to mention if either wants to ride or die as old-school CoC—you can imagine the fireworks that will inevitably result.

The other observation I’ll make is that ministers in the first category have not only been migrating to the second category; the very boundaries between the two have been blurring for going on two decades, and for all the reasons I outlined in the second post in this series. The upshot is that soon, even very soon, CoC ministers and the congregations they lead will by and large be evangelical in tone, sensibility, doctrine, and liturgical practice, with one or two holdover curiosities from bygone days (like weekly communion or gorgeous four-part harmony)—while, say, 10-15% rep the old line and another 5-10% are stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land, one foot placed in evangelicalism and one foot squarely in the mainline. If you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m putting my money.

5. A final word, though. If I’ve only tangentially mentioned the mainline in this series, I’ve not at all mentioned the Anabaptists. Although churches of Christ lack a genetic connection to Mennonites or Brethren, there is a real family resemblance, and for many of us—especially readers of King, McClendon, Yoder, Hauerwas, Stringfellow, Camp, and other radical types—there has always been a dream that, steering between the Scylla of evangelicalism and the Charybdis of catholicism, some segment of CoC congregations would reclaim their pacifist, primitivist patrimony and pursue a third path, Anabaptist style. Alas, it was not to be. The catholic genes were too weak, the siren songs of the evangelicals too strong. (Sirenum scopuli: the birthplace of CCM!) The truth is, even the Anabaptists have authoritative tradition. An anti-tradition tradition can maintain itself as a tradition for only so long. Eventually, a pull from without or a push from within will break the spell; and once it’s broken, there’s no means of recasting it. Tradition necessarily requires concrete, practical means of perpetuating itself in recognizable continuity across generations and geography. All the more so when, as in the case of Anabaptists, the community’s self-definition requires unanimous agreement to forsake violence in all circumstances. Given the history of congregational conflict in churches of Christ, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that they aren’t going to spontaneously become pacifist tomorrow.

In other words, the lesson reiterated in earlier posts remains true: Try as you might, you can’t change yourself from having been one particular tradition into having been a different tradition all along. You are what you are. Yet change, perhaps counterintuitively, remains a possibility. How so? Let me put it this way. It is possible to “be changed” from what one was—in this case, a sort of catholic restorationist sacramental free church—“into” evangelical because evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

And this is why, to bring matters full circle, I made clear in the third (“and final”—ha) post why so many CoC-ers welcome the evangelical transition and, just so, why that transition has been so apparently frictionless. Very few people see it as a negative thing, much less a betrayal. It just seems like being, well, Christian. And once non-denom evangelicalism becomes synonymous with being Christian, it’s the only game in town.

CoC: past, present, future

My two posts on churches of Christ—the first on CoC-past as not-evangelical-but-catholic, the second on CoC-future as no-longer-catholic-but-evangelical—were intended to be merely descriptive, but I think their overall effect was something of a downer.

On one hand, many people reached out to say how much the “catholic” piece resonated with them, giving words to something they’d never quite been able to articulate. Most of these comments were tinged with lament, however. They came from people who either (1) ended up leaving churches of Christ for catholic traditions or (2) have remained, but regret and mourn the loss of the very elements that once distinguished the CoC from evangelicalism (which elements are now receding in the rear view mirror). On the other hand, the second post seemed to pour cold water on the whole thing, framing the potentially positive way of telling the “free church catholic” Stone-Campbell story as a sort of declension narrative: i.e., a tale of a movement “falling” from its evangelical-distinct origins into evangelical-adjacent status before eventual, total evangelical absorption (or acquiescence).

It turns out there are a lot of people who love what historically made the CoC distinguishable from evangelicals, and it stirs up a lot of emotions to see that passing away.

I wanted to add a few final comments along these and other lines, based on some questions and comments I received.

1. There’s an inevitable imbalance in my presentation of the “catholicity” of churches of Christ. More than one reader argued that, while the “CoC as more catholic than evangelical” frame might be on to something at the historical-theological level, the super-majority of actual CoC-attending Christians would never dream of darkening the doorstep of a catholic church (certainly Roman, but also Eastern or Anglican). That’s true. Also true: There is no mass exodus at present from churches of Christ to catholic traditions. At first I worried I’d overstated this point, but actually, you’ll see in the original post that I carefully qualified my claim:

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

I’ve emphasized the relevant clause. It’s clear that I don’t have in view normie CoC-ers. They’re not headed in droves for Rome or Constantinople. Rather, the people I’m thinking of are CoC-ers who’ve earned graduate degrees, particularly in a theological discipline. Minimally, they no longer fit the typical CoC mold: they’re pro-creed, or pro-tradition, or pro-icons, or pro–feast days, or high-liturgical, or post-biblicist, or in love with the church fathers or medievals, or what have you. Maximally, they end up converting. (Anecdotally, the more progressive go Episcopalian and the more conservative go Roman or Orthodox.)

In any case, that should clear up, if it wasn’t clear before, the subset of folks I have in mind. Which leads to the next point.

2. My broad thesis can be stated plainly:

Those churches of Christ that still exist today are increasingly evangelical in doctrine, practice, and worship; the members of such churches, especially Millennials and Gen Z, are increasingly evangelical in both style and substance; and these trends are picking up speed with every day.

I take this as given. I’ve run it by multiple scholars of CoC history. No one has gainsaid it. Every piece of anecdotal evidence confirms it. Unless and until someone objects to it as a true description of a social phenomenon, I will assume everyone agrees to its truth, however they may feel about it.

An additional anecdotal observation: For five years I have been teaching 18-22-year olds who are, nine times out of ten, the products of Bible-belt low-church traditions. In nearly every case the CoC-ers are indistinguishable from their Baptist and non-denom peers. This is because, at root, Millennial and Gen Z Baptists and CoC-ers alike have become non-denom-ers in all but name. For this reason, likewise, the “members” of each of these categories church-hop between Baptist, CoC, and non-denom congregations (without, naturally, placing actual “membership,” which now also appears to be a thing of the past), and they see no discrepancy or oddity in their doing so. And this, finally, is because, mostly to a person, they are DIY evangelicals at heart. The name or tradition on the side of a church building (or, as they might say first, in the URL of the church website) means next to nothing; for someone who attends there, at least from these generations, such an identity is only skin deep. Beneath the skin lies the soul of non-denom evangelicalism. And it is strong; it is a force to be reckoned with.

So: The flip side of being clear (negatively) that the catholic vein of CoC-dom has nearly run dry is being clear (positively) that there is a theological sensibility winning out in churches of Christ. That sensibility is evangelical. It is found in the pews, in the pulpits, in the worship, and in the doctrines (or lack thereof) that one finds on the websites and in the elderships and classrooms of CoC congregations.

3. A friend asks: Why so certain? Even if I’m right about the trajectory, is my confidence about the future warranted?

Theoretically, I grant the point. No one knows the future. In this case, though, I think I have very good grounds for confidence. Here’s why.

First, I’m not so much predicting the future as commenting with honesty about the present. There are approximately one-seventh as many CoC-ers in America as there are Mormons. That number has been declining for a long time. Covid only sped up the process. Some churches are closing their doors; some are changing the name over the doors; some are losing their younger members, not only to unbelief, but also to the local community church; and most of those that remain are changing so as to look more like said community church. In a few pockets (Abilene, Searcy, Nashville, et al) the old-school persists, and some congregations that look like “traditional” churches of Christ continue to flourish. But even these, while retaining the trappings of the old line, are different than they once were, in subtle but significant ways. The most important difference is an overt political and cultural realignment with American evangelicalism. Which means that, for them, their evolving sensibilities may, for now, be located less in worship style or explicit doctrine than in tribal affiliation. But the latter will begin to manifest in the former sooner rather than later.

Second, there are simply no reasons I have ever encountered, in any context, to believe that any of the trends identified above is likely to cease. This is because, while it may sound like I am sounding the death knell of churches of Christ, that’s not in fact what I’m doing. So far as I can tell, most adult believers in CoC congregations today, and many of their children, will remain Christian in twenty or forty years, just as a sizable number of the congregations they inhabit will still be around. The question is not a matter of wholesale denominational disappearance or widespread apostasy. The question, instead, is: Will they—will any of them—identify as “church of Christ”? And even when they do, will such an identification entail a substantial resemblance to CoC doctrine and practice 150 years prior? Or will the resemblance be far closer to their evangelical neighbors? The question answers itself.

Third, then, while it may be the case that “trending evangelical” is something to bemoan on the part of old-timers, catholic weirdos, and Stone-Campbell eggheads, what is evident is that most ordinary CoC members, leaders, and congregations don’t see it that way. They see their evolution as both consistent with their past and desirable as their future. Such persons would, I think justifiably, roll their eyes at my reflections in these posts. They don’t see American evangelicalism as a fate worse than death. They see it as an imperfect but nonetheless healthy expression of the gospel in our context. Now, it is undeniable, at the historical, sociological, and theological level, that for churches of Christ to complete their annexation by evangelicalism would mean, in one sense, the end of churches of Christ as we have known them. But from death comes life; resurrection follows crucifixion; organic, healthy change sometimes requires painful pruning. That’s what mainstream evangelical-trending CoC-ers would say and do say. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so, and nothing in principle makes their judgment problematic. It’s only old-school and/or catholic oddballs and academics who find themselves squirming in their pews.

4. What then? After all this analysis, is there anything constructive to be said or done? Let me close by making a few gestures in this direction.

(a) Many churches of Christ are not in a good way. I know multiple consultants who receive weekly calls from congregations asking for help, and all the consultants can offer is wisdom about how to die well. This is a fact on the ground that anyone plugged into CoC networks knows full well, and it’s neither pessimistic nor alarmist to say it out loud. As I have written elsewhere, what many churches need today from their elders and pastors is nothing so much as hospice care. They’re going to die anyway. A church can die faithlessly, grieving as those without hope, or it can die faithfully, with hope in Christ our Savior. Aiding communities in doing the latter is good, sacred work. We need more ministers willing to do it and trained in the art of how to do it well. And we’re aren’t doing anyone a favor by putting our head in the sand, pretending it’s not happening.

(b) There is a fundamental misdiagnosis I have also written about elsewhere. That is, pastors and elders—always fighting the last generation’s war—suppose that what ails their churches is too much: too much doctrine, too much orthodoxy, too much firmness, too much concreteness, in short, too many answers and not enough questions. This is wrong. What bedevils churches today, and above all the under-30 crowd, is too little: too little doctrine, too little liturgy, too little substance, too little stability, too little confidence, too few answers. Young people today are begging for answers and what they’re receiving is mostly scraps and shrugs. They are drowning, and no one is throwing them a life raft. Instead, they hear a voice calling to them: “I’d try to help, but I wouldn’t want to presume!” Presume away. If the church lacks confidence in the truth of the gospel, then of all people we are most to be pitied. Preach the truth in love. That’s the answer now, as it always was and always will be, because both truth and love are synonymous with Jesus himself, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

(c) Evangelicalism is not a monolith. It includes charismatics, prosperity preachers, entertainment mega-churches (think: spotlights and smoke machines), generic DIY-ers, and confessional traditions. For CoC-ers trending evangelical, it is certainly possible to find prudent ways to avoid the first four and aim for the fifth. It’s possible, I say, but difficult. The reason is that confessional traditions belong, as the name says, to traditions defined by confessions. Those confessions may be broadly Reformed, or Anglican, or Lutheran, or Wesleyan, or other. They are embodied in books of discipline, common prayer, catechisms, institutes, seminaries, synods, and more. They characterize an entire ecclesial culture, rooted in a particular history out of which the tradition itself and its manifold churches spring forth and from which they continue to be nourished.

That’s what makes “becoming” confessional-evangelical difficult for churches of Christ. Not only would a congregation need to be led by a wise and trusted pastor. The elders would all have to be on the same page. And they, together with the pastor and the rest of the ministry staff, would have to guide and catechize the congregation such that folks in the pews—not only formed as CoC-ers but trained, as levelers, to think like egalitarian biblicists—would consent unanimously to become, or even to join, a preexisting confessional tradition. Doubtless such a process could begin incrementally, without many people realizing it. And a partial move in this direction is easy to imagine. But a comprehensive transformation? Possible in theory, I suppose, but difficult in practice.

(d) Having said that: You’d be surprised, if you know anything about churches of Christ, what you’re liable to find in some of them today. I know one that recites the Apostles’ Creed. I know another that practices corporate confession and absolution of sin in weekly public worship. I know another that says the Lord’s Prayer. Others process to the front to receive communion; still others locate communion at the climax of the liturgy, following the sermon. Many have begun following the church calendar and/or preaching according to the lectionary (goodbye, sermon series!). Taken together, these are rather radical changes to two centuries’ worth of habits; these habits amounted to a default setting for Sunday morning once assumed to be an immutable blueprint. So perhaps I am overestimating the potential resistance to change and underestimating the hunger for sacred tradition and historic liturgical patterns.

(e) The challenge that remains is this. If part of the underlying problem is DIY-ness, how does a congregation opt, with radical autonomy, to submit to an authority beyond itself? How, in a word, can a church use its autonomy to undo its autonomy? And with lasting effects? No one wants to make a change today that’ll probably by reversed tomorrow. Nothing could be more enervating for the task of reform.

In this case, I have little to offer. It feels like an intractable problem. But perhaps it is not. Here, as always, we are reduced to prayer, specifically to invocation of the Spirit. The church is dead apart from the life the coming of the Spirit brings. What we must do, then, besides our analysis and our planning and our working, is beg the Spirit to come to our aid.

So we cry: Veni sancte Spiritus!

And it’s a sweet irony, ending there, if you recall the role of the Spirit in Stone-Campbell teaching. Having once shrunk him down to size—to the size of the Bible on the lectern, in fact—we now plead for his sovereign presence once more. Mortification and vivification: that is what we need. To be slain by his fiery power and raised by his might to the only life worth having; his life, which is the unquenchable life of Christ.

CoC: catholic, not evangelical

For the whole of my academic career, it has been difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who have no prior knowledge of the Stone-Campbell Movement why churches of Christ are not best understood as “evangelical,” that is to say, as part of that rambunctious and dysfunctional family called “American evangelicalism.” Even, for a time, it was hard for me to understand it myself. But I knew it at a gut level and at the level of anecdotal experience. Regarding the latter, for example, I never once heard the term “evangelical” growing up in church; the way evangelical friends would describe their theological assumptions and church practices sounded bizarre and alien to me; and even at the level of guest speakers, popular books, websites, music, and the like, there was usually slim overlap, if any at all.

The difficulty in explanation is made the harder by the fact that, beginning a couple decades ago, mainstream churches of Christ began to be absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that will reach completion in another decade or two. Walk into a local CoC congregation today, that is, and likely as not you won’t be able to tell much of a difference between it and the neighboring non-denominational or otherwise evangelical church. (The most probable oddity would be a cappella singing or weekly communion, the first of which is already on the wane, the second of which, I fear, is not far behind it.) But the very fact that this registers as a jarring change, that sociologists and historians of American religion see it as a dramatic shift, tells you that once upon a time, and for most of their history, churches of Christ were set apart from evangelicalism as a whole, and thus poorly understood as a subset thereof.

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

Why is that? Why would going from the lowest-of-low congregationalist, non-creedal, primitivist traditions to the highest-of-high episcopal-creedal traditions make a kind of intuitive, not to say theological, sense? Why would I call the CoC DNA catholic and not evangelical, even though the Stone-Campbell tradition has its origins in frontier revivalism and nineteenth-century American restorationism?

For the following reasons. Each of these is fundamental conviction either taught explicitly or imbibed like mother’s milk from pulpit and classroom in historic churches of Christ (prior to the ongoing evangelical takeover); taken together, they form a kind of unofficial catholic catechesis:

1. The founding of the church is the climax and telos of the biblical story. The church is the point, not an incidental or accidental or epiphenomenal feature of both the Christian life and the good news of the gospel.

2. It is impossible for an individual to be saved alone, by herself, apart from the ministerial intervention and interposition of Christ’s church. In other words, the church is herself the corporate sacrament of salvation.

3. The church is therefore necessary for salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. To be saved is to belong to the body of Jesus Christ, which is the bride for whom he died.

4. “Faith alone” apart from baptism, which is to say, apart from the sacramental administration of the church, is insufficient for salvation.

5. Baptism, in short, is necessary for salvation. Why? Because by its instrumentality God himself acts to cleanse you from sin, unite you to Christ, knit you to his body, and fill you with his Spirit.

6. “An unbaptized Christian” is an oxymoron. To be Christian is to be baptized; to be baptized is to be Christian. The two are synonymous.

7. Public worship in the assembly on Sunday morning without the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a self-contradiction in terms. When the church gathers on the Lord’s day, she administers the sacrament of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. If she fails to do so, she has failed to worship in the Spirit as the Lord commanded.

8. In a word, communion is to be celebrated each and every Sunday, where two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name. (And if you missed it on Sunday morning, when everybody gathers again for another service that evening, you step out at a fitting time with others who missed it in order to partake now: better late than never.)

9. It is possible, by apostasy or moral failure, to fall from grace, that is, to lose one’s salvation. In traditional terms, mortal sin is a live possibility.

10. The moral, the spiritual, and the liturgical are utterly intertwined, so much so that they are inseparable. On one hand, nothing is more important than the worship of Christ in and with his body on Sunday morning; on the other, a life of Sunday worship apart from daily discipleship would be an act of self-condemnation. Following Christ is a comprehensive task, demanding one’s all. Everything else is secondary. But it is found in and made possible by thick membership in the Christian community—and only there. Christianity is impossible without the church, for the church simply is Christianity as God instituted it on earth.

11. The life of the early church, for all its faults, is the paradigm of moral, spiritual, and sacramental faithfulness. It is there to be imitated by the saints for all time.

12. The canon within the canon is not, as heirs of Luther and Calvin suppose, Galatians and Romans. Instead, it is the book of Acts together with the Pastoral Epistles. There we see the blueprint for ecclesiology, God’s vision for a lasting society on earth that exists for the praise of his glory in the midst of a fallen world. The leadership structure and overall organization of God’s church is therefore of paramount importance, as is her unity, being the chief object of the Spirit’s will and work, not to mention the high priestly prayer of Jesus himself.

I could go on, but that covers the main themes in broad strokes. I trust these convictions make legible, first, why churches of Christ have always been out of step with evangelicals; second, why those raised in the CoC don’t find themselves, their beliefs, or their practices reflected in American evangelicalism; third, why it’s not unfitting (however odd it may sound) to describe CoC-ers as more catholic than evangelical; and fourth, why it is that folks with CoC backgrounds who go to seminary or pursue doctoral studies in theological disciplines so often find themselves drawn to capitalizing the “c” in “catholic”—i.e., seeing little appeal in the churches on offer between their own movement (on one pole of the continuum) and the great episcopal-creedal traditions (on the other pole). Go big or go home, you know?

Besides, if what you’re after is an authoritative community that makes the church and her sacraments central, both to God’s salvific purposes revealed in the Bible and to the daily lives of the faithful, while giving doctrinal, liturgical, and moral priority to “the early church,” then it makes all the sense in the world that exposure to the church fathers—from St. Ignatius to St. Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr to St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius to St. Basil, St. Augustine to St. Cyril, St. Ephrem to St. Leo, and so on—would have the simple but logical effect of expanding the meaning of “the early church” to more than the initial apostolic generation(s). That particular marker in time is somewhat arbitrary, anyway, given that the first Christian assemblies were terribly imperfect (hello, Corinth) and that the very notion of a neatly pristine, bow-tied “apostolic age” is possible to conceive only in retrospect, following centuries of debate regarding, among other things, the boundaries of the canon. And since we know that such debate was itself normed by the Rule of faith, which was transmitted orally, and by the authority of bishops, who were ordained in succession from the time of the apostles, then we have no clear (non-question-begging) demarcation between “early” and “late” or “developed” doctrine and practice in the first half millennium of the church. Only consider Lutheran and other modern Protestant disdain for the Pastorals, along with the rest of the “catholic” epistles. They spy “development” already within the canonical New Testament, so they relegate it to “later,” “secondary” status by the slander term “catholic.”

But that just won’t do for a proper doctrine of Scripture or of the church. And if it won’t do, then there are only so many alternatives. One alternative is to remain. Another is to go. The middle options are small beer by comparison.

Reunion

Reading theology from the previous century has the power to trick you into thinking that reunion between the divided communions was, and remains, a live possibility. As late as 1999, when Robert Jenson published the second volume of his systematic theology, the bulk of which is a fulsome ecclesiology in close conversation with both Vatican II and the most recent ecumenical dialogues, you would be forgiven for getting the impression that reunion—between Rome and Wittenburg, between Rome and Canterbury, even between Rome and Constantinople—was conceivable within our lifetime, even right over the horizon.

More generally, reading about church division and the need for church unity on the page can make the matter seem rather simple, certainly from a low-church or Protestant perspective. It inevitably reduces the problem to disagreements over theology; accordingly, once those disagreements are resolved, unity becomes achievable.

To my readerly mind, it made the most sense that, if any communions were to reunite in our lifetime, it would be Rome and the East. After all, on the page, very little in terms of substantive theological disagreements obtain between them. (I can defend that claim another time!) On the page, Rome is willing to meet the East halfway—and then some. On the page, these things can be worked out. The unity of God’s people is at stake, after all! The very truth of Jesus’s prayer for his church in John 17!

On the page, all of this seems eminently plausible. Until, that is, you meet an actual, flesh-and-blood Orthodox Christian. Until you read an actual Orthodox writer who is neither American nor trained in American institutions. Until you visit an actual Orthodox country. Until you attend the Divine Liturgy or visit an Orthodox monastery.

And then it hits you. This is a pipe dream. Reunion between Rome and the East will never happen. Not ever. Not until the Lord’s return. Rome could meet the East 99% of the way, and the East would look at that 1% and say: Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good.

Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic. Or perhaps it sounds like I’m indicting the East or endorsing the West. That’s not at all what I mean, though. As David Bentley Hart wrote a few years back, Eastern Orthodoxy has always been skeptical of the ecumenical movement, for at least two reasons intrinsic to and coherent with its own teachings and history. The first is that ecumenism waters down the faith to a few core beliefs beyond which all else, especially liturgical form and sacred tradition, is adiaphora. In other words, ecumenism Protestantizes the faith. But if you think that Protestantism is wrong about the faith, why would you do that? The second reason is that the East does not believe the church is divided, or that it lacks the fullness of Christ’s promise to his one church. It does not believe, as Rome does, that it suffers a “wound.” Rather, the East believes wholeheartedly and without apology that it is and forever shall be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church that Christ founded by his Spirit on Pentecost some two thousand years ago. It has kept the faith whole and entire; it has preserved the faith once for all delivered to the saints; it has not wavered; it has not broken; it has not failed. It cheerfully welcomes all, including schismatics and heretics (i.e., Romans and Protestants), to join its ranks. But it is unbroken, undivided, and complete. Ecumenism, on this view, is at once an affront, a contradiction, a threat, and a solvent to this crucial truth. To admit it, to engage it, to accept it, would be to deny the fact of Orthodoxy itself.

So, as I say, I’m not writing in critique of the East. I’m writing with a bird’s-eye view on the total matter of church unity, in global perspective. And after a century of optimism, things don’t look good. Despair is a sin, so we aren’t allowed that route. But it is hard to see, for me it is impossible to see, what it might mean to hope and work for the unity of the church across both the world and millennia-long divisions. For those divisions have become cultural, deeply ingrained in the folkways and forms of life that define distinct peoples, such as Greece or Russia. What would, what could, reunion mean for such people on the ground (and not on the page)? I have no answer.

Jenson, following Ratzinger, notes at the beginning of volume one of his systematics that theologians under conditions of ecclesial division can only write for the one church that God will, by his grace, someday bring about. He says further that such unity must be a work of the Spirit—and the Spirit may act tomorrow. I believe these words. I follow that vision. But I worry, sometimes, that they are merely marks on a page. For the letter kills; the Spirit gives life.

In a word, in the matter of our impossible division, we are reduced to prayer. So I pray:

How long, O Lord? How long will your people be separated one from another? Come, Spirit, come! Restore your people. Make them one as you are one. Hear our prayer, and hear your Son’s, on our behalf, and for his sake: Amen.