The greatest threat facing the church today

In my latest piece for Christianity Today, I propose the following thesis:

The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

That’s a controversial claim for many reasons, and I’m not dogmatic about it. It could be wrong. Moreover, it’s not self-evident that there is a meaningful hierarchy of threats facing the church. Perhaps there are a handful, all on the same level; or a variety that are incommensurable. Finally, a year or two back Alan Jacobs and Andy Crouch took me (ever so kindly) to task for a claim like this one, proposing instead that Mammon, not Digital, is the principal threat; and, further, that Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mammon.

With those caveats in place, what are the candidates for this particular category? What are the most significant threats facing the church today? By what measures should we judge them? And which church, or churches, or regions and cultures of the world, should we have in mind?

The range of answers would at least need to be large enough and systemic enough to threaten millions of believers at once, and in insidious and powerful ways difficult to suss out and extinguish. In the excerpt above I mention some “isms” that people are worried about. Let’s expand that list:

• Capitalism

• Progressivism

• Liberalism

• Secularism

• Atheism

• Scientism

• Legalism

• Racism

• Nationalism

• Imperialism

• War-mongering

• Industrialism

• Environmentalism

• Utilitarianism

• Individualism

• Nihilism

• Anti-natalism

• Technophilia

• Thanatophilia (i.e., the culture of death)

The important thing to see is that the nature of the threat doesn’t consist in discrete events or even types of events—famine, plague, poverty, war. These are evils and cause mass suffering, but they aren’t threats to the church, at least not in the way I’m using the term. These and other trials the church will always have her. They’re part of the way of the world, the world we long for God to redeem. They aren’t systems or structures or ideologies perpetrated by human beings (except when they are—but they are rarely reducible to ideology or policies, for the simple reason that they are insoluble, perennial problems of finite, mortal existence in a fallen world). More to the point, in the midst of great suffering the church sometimes rises to the occasion in service, courage, and sacrifice. In the face of danger, damage, and pain the church can fail, falter, or flourish. But she can’t be what God calls her to be if she isn’t prepared—if, that is, her foundations are so eroded that she forgets her own reason for being.

It is the question of what enacts such erosion that I am naming with the language of “threat.” A major threat to the church would snuff out its life whether it was the best of times or the worst of times; it would silence the gospel before anyone could hear it or live it out at all.

Another way to put it would be to ask, as I did recently, what idol or idols a given generation or place or people worships, and why, and what counterfeit blessings it receives in return, and how its worship and what it receives in turn shape and form it in the image of said idol(s).

I’m far from dogmatic on this question, as I said at the outset. If I had to pick five, I suppose I would choose technophilia, individualism, utilitarianism, capitalism, and progressivism. But then, how many of these are birthed from or contained within liberalism, understood as the ideology developed and advanced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Not to mention scientism, which arguably is concomitant with both liberalism and utilitarianism and, later, with the love of the future that finds concrete expression in progressivism and technophilia.

And is Mammon then the devilish father of them all? I leave the question open for others to chime in.

Update (seconds after pressing publish): I realize that I did not specify that I am here thinking exclusively about exogenous threats—if I were put on the spot about internal threats, I might say that church division is the single greatest threat to the church’s integrity and to the credibility of the gospel she proclaims to the world. Not in view here!

It’s publication day! The Church: A Guide to the People of God is here!

It’s out! It’s here! Order a copy! My second book in the same month! There are no more to come anytime soon, so buy them up while you can!

Buy one for yourself, for your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, your nephews, your nieces, your godchildren, your parents, your pastor, your youth pastor, your college pastor, your professor—or all of them!

Don’t take my word for it—listen to Andrew Wilson, Stanley Hauerwas, Ephraim Radner, Karen Kilby, Matthew Levering, Karen Kilby, and Mark Kinzer, all of whom endorsed it. They can’t be wrong, can they?

The first review of the book came out last week in The Gospel Coaliation. Samuel Parkison writes:

Gentiles don’t become Jews, but they can become the true seed of Abraham through adoption (see Gal. 3:16). This deep awareness of the church’s Old Testament connections is a welcome emphasis. All the more so because of the undeniably beautiful prose in which East develops this idea. Indeed, The Church can just as easily be labeled a work of art as a work of theology. For example, his reflections on the typological resonances between Eve, Mary, Israel, and the church are nothing less than riveting.

He concludes: “This is a beautiful book. Taken in such a way, The Church should receive a wide and appreciative readership.”

Come on: There’s just no way a book that looks that good can be bad on the inside. By way of reminder, here is the book’s description:

You belong to God's family. But do you understand what that means?

The Bible tells the story of God and his people. But it is not merely history. It is our story. Abraham is our father. And Israel's freedom from slavery is ours.

Brad East traces the story of God's people, from father Abraham to the coming of Christ. He shows how we need the scope of the entire Bible to fully grasp the mystery of the church. The church is not a building but a body. It is not peripheral or optional in the life of faith. Rather, it is the very beating heart of God's story, where our needs and hopes are found.

Buy it wherever books are sold. And while you’re at it, buy the rest of the volumes in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series—The Apostles’ Creed by Ben Myers, The Lord’s Prayer by Wes Hill, The Ten Commandments and Baptism by Peter Leithart, and God’s Word by John Kleinig. Kleinig also authored the seventh in the series, due next March, called The Lord’s Supper. The last two should come out sometime in the next 12-24 months…

Get the whole set! Starting with mine! Today! Now! Ahorita! S'il vous plaît!

Thanks to all. This one’s a love letter to the church—both the Church and the churches that I have called home over the last four decades. I hope it shows.

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

Jenson on catechesis for our time

I’ve done my best to read everything Robert Jenson ever wrote, but he was so prolific that I regularly stumble onto something I’ve never seen before (or, at least, have no memory of reading). The latest is an essay on catechesis.

It comes from a 1999 volume that Jenson and Carl Braaten co-edited, titled Marks of the Body of Christ. It consists of essays by a wide range of ecumenical scholars on Luther’s so-called seven marks of the church: the word of God, the sacraments, the office of the keys, the pastoral office, the holy cross, and the liturgy. The volume interprets the cross as discipleship and the liturgy as catechesis, since Luther uses the latter term to pick out the Creed, the Decalogue, and the Lord’s Prayer as central to the church’s public worship of God.

Jenson’s essay is called “Catechesis for Our Time.” It’s a barnburner. If I could, I would republish the entirety below. Since I can’t, I’ll limit myself to quoting some of the juiciest excerpts.

Jenson, for readers unfamiliar with him, was born in 1930 and died in 2017. He was a polymath, a Midwesterner, a Lutheran, and German-trained. He was deeply involved in international ecumenical dialogues throughout his career and taught at a variety of institutions. He remained an ordained Lutheran all his life, but was deeply catholic in piety, liturgy, doctrine, and ecclesial sensibility. He was an astute observer of late modern culture in all its permutations and depredations.

Here’s how the essay begins:

I began teaching in 1955, in a liberal arts college of the church. My students were mostly fresh from active participation in their home town Protestant congregations. In those days, I and others like me re­garded it as our duty, precisely for the sake of students’ faith, to loosen them up a bit. They had been drilled in standard doctrine — Jesus is the Son of God, God is triune but what that means is a mystery, heaven is the reward of a good life — to the point of insensibility to the gospel itself.

In 1966 I left undergraduate teaching. Then just 23 years later, I re­turned to teach at a similar churchly liberal arts college. My students were again mostly fresh from active participation in Protestant congre­gations — though now with more Catholics mixed in. During those years, the situation exactly reversed itself.

It is now my duty to inform these young Christians that, e.g., there once was a man named Abraham who had an interesting life, that then there was Moses and that he came before Jesus, that Jesus was a Jew who is thought by some to be risen from the dead, that there are command­ments claiming to be from God, and that they frown on fornication and such, and other like matters.

Well hello there, shock of recognition. It’s always good to be reminded that Protestant liberalism comes for everyone; evangelicals are not immune, they just lag the mainline by a couple generations.

Jenson comments on the development of the catechumenate and the logic that lay behind it. He writes:

[Following the initial apostolic generations] the church needed and was granted institutions that could sustain her faithfulness within continuing history. So the canon of Scripture emerged, and the episcopate in local succession, and creeds and rules of faith. And so also an instructional institution arose, situated between conversion and baptism.

For it was the experience of the church, after a bit of time had passed in which to have experience, that baptism and subsequent life in the litur­gical and moral life of the church, if granted immediately upon hearing and affirming the gospel, were too great a shock for spiritual health. Life in the church was just too different from life out of the church, for people to tolerate the transfer without some preparation.

Converts were used to religious cults that had little moral content, that centered often on bloody sacrifice, and that were oriented — as we might now put it — to the “religious needs” of the worshiper. They were entering a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God. They were entering a cult cen­tered around an unbloody and therefore nearly incomprehensible sacri­fice. And most disorienting of all, they were entering a cult that made ex­plicit moral demands. They needed to be coached and rehearsed in all that, if their conversion was to be sustainable.

Catechesis therefore involves a comprehensive instruction in three areas of life: worship, ethics, and doctrine. Here’s how Jenson puts it:

Thus they needed to study, for a first thing, liturgics, that is, how to do these Christian things, so different from what could appeal to their exist­ing habits and tastes. And they needed to be instructed in how to under­stand what they were doing.

And then there were those moral demands. Christian heads of household were not supposed to treat their wives as subjects, and both husband and wife were supposed to be sexually faithful — for converts from late-antique society such puritanism was a shocking violation of nature. More amazingly yet, Christian parents did not get rid of inconvenient children, not even of unborn ones. The list went on and on of things that converts’ previous society regarded as rights, that the church regarded as sins. If converts were to stand up under all these infringements on their personal pursuits of happiness, they needed some time under the care of moral instructors and indeed of watchful moral disciplinarians.

And then there were those creeds and doctrines. New converts were used to religions with little specificity, and so with little intellectual con­tent. You were expected to worship Osiris in Egypt and the Great Mother in Asia Minor and Dionysus in Greece, and all of them and a hundred oth­ers simultaneously in Rome, and if the theologies of these deities could not all be simultaneously true, no matter, since you were not anyway expected to take their myths seriously as knowledge. For a relatively trivial but historically pivotal case: Did you have to think that the notorious lunatic Caligula was in fact divine? Not really, just so long as you burnt the pinch of incense.

But with the Lord, the Father of Jesus, things were different. He in­sisted that you worship him exclusively or not at all. And that imposed a cognitive task: if you were to worship the Lord exclusively, you had to know who he is, you had to make identifying statements about him and intend these as statements of fact. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Caesar or Alexander, the Lord had led Israel from Egypt and what that meant for the world. You had to learn that in the same history occu­pied by Tiberius one of his deputies had crucified an Israelite named Jesus and what that in sheer bloody fact meant for the world. You had to learn that this Jesus was raised from the dead, and try to figure out where he might now be located. It was a terrible shock for the religious inclusivists and expressivists recruited from declining antiquity. There was a whole li­brary of texts to be studied and conceptual distinctions to be made, if new converts were in the long run to resist their culturally ingrained inclusivism and relativism.

Catechesis was born as the instruction needed to bring people from their normal religious communities to an abnormal one. That is, it was born as liturgical rehearsal and interpretation, moral correction, and in­struction in a specific theology. Apart from need for these things, it is not apparent that the church would have had to instruct at all.

One more excerpt, this time about what it means for the church to catechize the baptized for liturgical participation in a post-Christendom cultural context, in light of the temptation to water down or eliminate what makes her worship unique, which is to say, Christian:

Instead of perverting her essential rites, the church must catechize. She must rehearse her would-be members in the liturgies, fake them through them step by step, showing how the bits hang together, and teach­ing them how to say or sing or dance them. And she must show them wherein these rites are blessings and not legal impositions.

Nor does it stop with the minimal mandates of Scripture. The church, like every living community, has her own interior culture, built up during the centuries of her history. That is, the acts of proclamation and baptism and eucharist are in fact embedded in a continuous tradition of ritual and diction and music and iconography and interpretation, which constitutes a churchly culture in fact thicker and more specific than any national or ethnic culture.

Now of course this tradition might have been different than it is. If the church’s first missionary successes had taken her more south than west, her music and architecture and diction and so on would surely have devel­oped differently. And in the next century, when the center of the church’s life will probably indeed be south of its original concentration, the church’s culture will continue to develop, and in ways that cannot now be predicted. But within Christianity, what might have been is beside the point; contingency is for Christianity the very principle of meaning; it is what in fact has happened — that might not have happened — that is God’s history with us, and so the very reality of God and of us.

We are not, therefore, permitted simply to shuck off chant and cho­rale, or the crucifix, or architecture that encloses us in biblical story, or ministerial clothing that recalls that of ancient Rome and Constantino­ple, or so on and on. Would-be participants will indeed find some of this off-putting; people will indeed drift into our services, not grasp the pro­ceedings, and drift out again. We will be tempted to respond by dressing in t-shirts and hiring an almost-rock group — not, of course, a real one — and getting rid of the grim crucifixes. Then we will indeed need less catechesis to adapt would-be participants to the church, because we will be much less church. If instead we are aware of the mission, and of the mission’s situation in our particular time, we will not try to adapt the church’s culture to seekers, but seekers to the church’s culture.

So, for an only apparently trivial example, it is almost universally thought that children must be taught childish songs, with which occasion­ally to interrupt the service and serenade their parents. They are not, it is supposed, up to the church’s hymns and chants. The exact opposite is the truth, and in any case the necessity. In my dim youth rash congregational officials once hired me to supervise the music program of a summer church school. I taught the children the ditties supplied me, but also some plain chant. When in the last days, I asked the children what they wanted to sing, it was always the plain chant.

Catechesis for our time, as the culture of the world and the culture of the church go separate ways, will be music training and art appreciation and language instruction, for the church’s music and art and in the lan­guage of Canaan. If we do not do such things, and with passionate inten­tion, the church will be ever more bereft of her own interior culture and just so become ever more the mere chaplaincy of the world’s culture. The recommendations of the “church growth” movement will indeed produce growth, but not of the church.

Coda: what is a CoC?

Based on feedback, a few more “family marks” to add to the original list of ten:

11. Anti-clericalism, i.e., no priestly caste set apart by holy orders or a white collar who alone can administer the Word and Supper of the Lord. (This is the obverse of egalitarianism, but more apt to historic CoC self-understanding, given egalitarianism’s range of meanings).

12. Cessationism, i.e., no charismatic gifts of the Spirit such as tongues, healings, visions, and exorcisms.

13. Amillennialism, i.e., no end-times speculation, no grand theories of Revelation, no in-case-of-Rapture church basements, no geopolitical dominoes to line up before the Parousia, no wedding of church and state to facilitate the time, times, and half a time.

14. Apoliticism, i.e., no stump speeches from the pulpit, no “how to vote” cards in the pews, no flags in the sanctuary, no mention of hot social topics in sermons, no sense that “America” is a “Christian nation” (after all, aren’t Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics running the show?), no sense that government or military or elite institutions are where the highest Christian vocations are found.

15. Arminianism, i.e., an absolute principled rejection of Calvinism in all its forms, an allergy to predestination, a maximal commitment to and reiteration of personal individual free will and its necessity for salvation—so that a person past the age of accountability must choose Christ for him- or herself; absent this free choice, salvation is impossible.

Now take these in reverse order, as I did in the previous post:

15. Like congregationalism and weekly celebration of Communion, Arminianism is here to stay. In this Churches of Christ are most like their American evangelical cousins, and have been from the beginning. The difference is that, historically at least, one’s choice of Christ found public and saving expression in baptism; the choice itself was a prelude, a necessary condition for the salvation found in baptism’s waters, whereas for wider evangelicalism the choice that is faith is itself both necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. Having said that, evangelicalism’s influence on CoC practice can be found in (a) de-emphasizing baptism’s salvific efficacy, (b) lowering the age at which children can be baptized (from, say, mid-teens to mid-elementary), and (c) emphasizing the importance of children’s faith at very young ages.

14. From anecdotal conversations with elders and ministers, the newfound presence of politicization in Churches of Christ is a shock to the system. Whether that means Trumpism in the pews, saying Black Lives Matter from the podium, the polarization around masking and church closures, or hot-button topics like abortion, gender, and sexuality rising to the surface, politics are present in CoC-dom in a way they’ve never been before. It turns out that Facebook and Fox News have been running their own parallel catechesis programs this whole time. They work.

13. The elements of CoC life that my evangelical friends have always found most bewildering are these: high sacraments, low politics, and no end times. From what I can tell, the amillennialism is still present, aside from the occasional lay member who claims to have cracked Revelation’s nut. As a distinguishing mark, though, this one’s pretty weak; there are plenty of churches out there (low church and high) that lack Rapture basements and dispensation-charts and hell houses. Plus, I’m always surprised by the obvious latent interest in “end times” questions that students and peers pose to me, sotto voce, after a class or before service. Millennialism we will always have with us.

12. On one hand, there aren’t exactly hundreds of hyper-charismatic Churches of Christ out there, with flags and dancing and Spirit-slain tongues-speakers running in between the pews. On the other hand, the doctrine of cessationism is quite weak among CoC-ers under 50, in terms of its “givenness” as biblical teaching, and most folks my age and younger are either outright charismatic or at least spooky-curious. I predict that, in another generation, this one’ll be a dead letter.

11. Stone-Campbellite egalitarianism is an odd duck. In its ideal form it radicalizes the priesthood of all believers to include, quite literally, any and every baptized adult. In practice it has usually meant that the church should be led by well-spoken, biblically literate, and gainfully employed married fathers—a station in life to which all young boys without exception should aspire. (No shade; I’m a product of “Timothy Class.”) Some of these men would be preachers and evangelists and teachers; more would be elders; all would, or could, preside at the Lord’s Supper. Every one of the baptized, though, stood on an “equal footing” before the Lord, and was equally capable of reading the clear word of God in Scripture. No special class of seminary-trained priests could tell you what God would tell you himself; as in Luther’s day, the schoolmen were the enemy, sent to complicate and obstruct the sound doctrine of the apostles, unlettered men that they were.
–So where do things stand on this front today? Strangely, in my view.
–Some churches have unfolded the egalitarian impulse to its logical conclusion: not just men but women, not just adults but children, not just the baptized but any and all who report faith in Christ are full members and participants and may, given the occasion, lead, preach, teach, or preside. This is of a piece with wider cultural trends, a one-by-one relaxation or elimination of obstacles and conditions meant to exclude some from what is seen to be the prerogative of all.
–At the same time, there has been a concurrent professionalization of formal ministry, church leadership, and public worship that belies the apparent democratizating trends just outlined. Anyone at all can “preside” at the Supper—but music is in the hands of the professionals. Churches tend to prefer ministry hires to have degrees in Bible or related disciplines and often an MDiv as well. And while Churches of Christ have always placed a premium on preaching, they have not been immune from the impact of the internet. Podcasts, YouTube, and social media have made the best preaching in the world immediately accessible to anyone with a smartphone, even as they have shaped the sermon’s form into something less like proclamation and more like a TED Talk, delivered by well-coiffed preachers in skinny jeans and replete with slickly produced slides and reams of asides and jokes and stories. (All, naturally, live-streamed to the world. And, if you’ve got someone on staff to do it, quickly re-packaged into bite-size videos and disseminated onto social media platforms, fingers crossed for the next viral hit. I call this the tech-church show.)
–In a word, Churches of Christ are simultaneously highly professionalized and extremely egalitarian. So while the anti-clericalism persists at the doctrinal level—no one stands between me and my Bible—it’s far less powerful at the ecclesial level. This trend is exacerbated by the fact that, while most churches are small and getting smaller, the few big churches that remain are only getting bigger. The result is an optical illusion. “Successful” churches look huge, and with huge-ness comes a fleet of well-trained staff members. The message is clear: If you build it, the professionals will come. And when they come, they will run the show. Accordingly, churches we would be tempted to call “mid-size” (I believe, for example, that a church with 350 members is in the ninetieth percentile for congregational size in America) spy this trend and feel the need to professionalize themselves, too, lest they be left behind (like that 90-member church around the block). In this way a certain egalitarianism works in tandem to produce more, not less, professionalization—which is itself a kind of clericalism, albeit in the guise of a kind of corporate management expertise.
–I trust the irony is clear enough: Historically, both Catholic and Protestant traditions ordained pastors who alone could administer the sacraments and proclaim God’s word. The anti-clerical American evangelical genius is to repudiate ordination in light of the priesthood of all believers. So anyone can baptize; anyone can preside. But there arises a new priesthood in the wake of the old: charismatic speakers and talented musicians. Yet such a priesthood appears to be marked by native talent, which in turn comes to function like nothing so much as ordination by genetic lottery. So we have holy orders by other means, rather than its elimination, even as the celebration of the sacraments is moved farther and farther from center stage. (Its nadir being Covid-era at-home self-serve with “whatever’s in the pantry.” This, not from lack of catechesis, but from successful catechesis.)

So. Taking stock. The point of these descriptions, following the previous post, is to wonder (a) how Churches of Christ have changed over the last three or four generations, especially since the turn of the century; and in light of those changes, to ask (b) what if anything continues to mark Churches of Christ as distinct from American evangelicalism. It seems clear to me that the additional five historic “family marks” above do not alter my original verdict. Either they have evolved into alignment with evangelicals or they never distinguished Churches of Christ from evangelicalism in the first place. The absorption, in other words, continues unabated—if it isn’t already complete.

What is a Church of Christ?

Historically, Churches of Christ have been known by a range of formal and informal marks:

1. The name on the building.

2. Congregational autonomy, i.e., governance of a local church by a group of elders; this has entailed (or been entailed by) rejection of any and all supra-local governance, institutional centralization, and denominational hierarchy.

3. Some kind of genetic and/or genealogical and/or self-conscious and/or affiliative connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement.

4. Weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

5. Adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins.

6. The absence of any creed.

7. A cappella worship.

8. The rejection of sacred tradition.

9. Biblicist primitivism, i.e., a Bible-alone approach to doctrine, ethics, worship, and polity with the aim of restoring, discovering, or approximating the original pattern of the church’s organization, proclamation, and mission. (Call this “the restorationist vision.”)

10. A yoked sectarian ecclesiology and soteriology, in other words, salvation through faithful membership in the one true church founded by Jesus Christ—and not in “denominations,” such as the Baptists or Lutherans or what have you.

You could add other marks (strong cessationism, say, or the absence of ordained pastors alongside the lack of a scripted “high” liturgy), but these ten are strong candidates for the most important family of marks, granting that they never were or could have been etched in stone—given the nature of the movement and the tradition’s polity.

Given the lack of formal organization beyond the local, however, the movement was always bound to change and develop, mutate or evolve. After all, there aren’t any hard controls in place to keep such change from occurring. The question then becomes: Which of these is either necessary or sufficient to identity a Church of Christ today?

Run back through the marks in reverse order:

10. While a hardline soteriology is still present in certain Churches of Christ, over the last few generations a once-severe sectarianism has yielded in various ways to a bigger-tent (evangelical) ecumenism.

9. The same is true here: while a general biblicism is present, it’s more evangelical than primitivist. You can recognize true primitivism by the kinds of arguments it generates, and those arguments are largely a feature of the past.

8. So far as I can tell, many Churches of Christ today are quite open toward sacred tradition, whether liturgical (Ash Wednesday, Advent, the lectionary) or doctrinal (reading Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Calvin or Barth) or linguistic (words like “Trinity” and “incarnation” and “catechesis”). Tradition of this sort is no longer self-evidently anathema.

7. A cappella is still dominant, but more and more churches are introducing instruments into public worship.

6. I know more than a few Churches of Christ that recite, affirm, or endorse either the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. And among those that do not, I don’t find many pastors who are theologically anti-creedal on principle, even if they wouldn’t impose a creed on their congregations.

5. Baptism is interesting. It retains its significance in many ways. Yet in two respects matters have changed (if only beneath the surface, as it were). On one hand, the age of children who are baptized has been moving “downward.” On the other, emphasis on immersion-baptism being necessary for salvation—that is, the very moment of being saved, apart from which one would be certainly damned—has likewise declined. “Emphasis” here is the key word: it’s about what is said and left unsaid. Baptism’s still a big deal. But CoC folks from a century ago would be shocked by what they would surely perceive as a lessening of emphasis on what matters most.

4. So far as I can tell, pretty much everyone still celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly. Someone, though, will be the first to change: perhaps through the now-popular “optional communion in the back, self-serve as you please” approach, perhaps through moving to (an occasional) monthly observance. Having said that, across all ten of these marks, including the next three, I’ll go on record to predict that, at the macro level, this is the last one to go for most congregations.

3. Connection to the Stone-Campbell Movement is a tricky question. Many Churches of Christ today have simply forgotten their connection to the SCM; by the same token, many congregations that have dropped the “of Christ” from their name retain a clear genetic influence from the Movement. In either case, though, neither elders nor pastors are reading Stone and Campbell; and in terms of contemporary authors, they’re just as likely to be reading prominent evangelicals as they are to be reading CoC scholars. The once-tight networks of ecclesial kinship that prevailed among Churches of Christ have been laid waste over the last twenty-five years, with the demolition showing no signs of abating. Not a few Churches of Christ today are led by elders and ministers who have no investment in perpetuating something called “the Church of Christ,” and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you.

2. Congregational autonomy hasn’t gone and isn’t going anywhere—though one now sees, and can imagine, semi-formal relationships with parachurch organizations that once (even in the recent past) would have been unthinkable, organizations whose doctrine and practice depart widely from historic CoC doctrine and practice.

1. Plenty of CoCs have, as I’ve said, dropped the genitive modifier; those that remain, by definition, have kept it. Tautologically, the name endures with congregations that have chosen to retain it, and it does not with those that have not.

Now. Suppose I’m broadly right about all this. I’ll ask again: What are the necessary and/or sufficient marks of a Church of Christ today? How should they be identified?

Marks six through ten appear not to be necessary, since there are Churches of Christ one can point to that lack them. In addition, the fifth and third marks, on baptism and SCM-heritage respectively, are tenuous. Plenty of traditions practice immersive believers baptism; in itself that’s not a distinguishing feature of Churches of Christ.

What we’re left with, it seems to me, are marks one, two, and four. Including some other marks in revised form, I think it’s fair to say that we have a Church of Christ today if:

(a) it calls itself a “Church of Christ,”

(b) its polity is congregationalist,

(c) it celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly,

(d) it baptizes by immersion (but not babies), and

(e) it belongs in some way to informal or affiliative CoC networks.

At the descriptive or sociological level, this appears accurate to me. But it raises some problems, or at least some questions.

First, apart from the name, aren’t there churches today that this definition describes that are manifestly not Churches of Christ? I know countless congregationalist churches that practice believers’ baptism and weekly communion. Typically they are “Bible churches” or “community churches” or non-denominational. Some of them even fall into (e), because for one reason or another they participate in CoC networks. They just don’t call themselves a Church of Christ.

Second, suppose a congregation drops the name but meets all the other criteria—including some of the others in the earlier list of ten marks. In other words, an ex–CoC that, for all intents and purposes, still looks and sounds and feels like a CoC. How should we think of such a church?

Third, are there today any material theological teachings or normative doctrinal claims that distinguish a Church of Christ from a non-denom evangelical church? It appears not—and this is in line with biblicism, not a contravention of it, since each believer as well as congregation is free to read the Bible for him/her/itself, minus the interposition of sacred tradition. And all the more if such folks opt to learn from concrete Christian traditions, whether Thomism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Calvinism or what have you. (Thus you have the irony of a biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist anti-tradition drinking deeply from the well of catholic tradition, and changing doctrine and liturgy accordingly.)

Fourth, what happens to contemporary Churches of Christ while, all around them, the informal networks that once sustained a thick CoC identity continue rapidly to decline? It’s not a secret that many Churches of Christ are on hospice care right now. The tight boundaries once drawn by editors, journals, preaching schools, the preaching circuit, famous ministers, widely read authors, colleges and universities, and other unofficial “denominational” organizations either no longer exist or possess a fraction of the power and influence they once exercised. In their absence, what holds the movement together, as a discrete, identifiable movement?

Fifth and finally, are the “family marks” that endure—(a) through (e) above—substantial enough to “pick out” congregations that a sociologist would agree form, or belong to, the same tradition/movement? Consider all the differences that mark Churches of Christ today: some worship with instruments, some don’t; some ordain, some don’t; some have women preachers, some don’t; some have women elders, some don’t; some are LGBT-affirming, some aren’t; some follow the lectionary, some don’t; some observe liturgical seasons, some don’t; some baptize Kindergarteners, some don’t; some “get political” (on Trump or race or gender or sex), some don’t; some say the Creed, some don’t; some “re-baptize” Catholics, some don’t; some practice open communion (i.e., inviting the unbaptized to partake), some don’t; some affirm the restorationist vision, some don’t; some affirm charismatic spiritual gifts, some don’t; some affirm military service, some don’t; some are biblicist, some aren’t; some reject eucharistic real presence, some don’t; some sing CCM “worship songs,” some don’t; some use a single cup, some don’t; some have statements of faith, some don’t; some affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, some don’t.

The list could go on. Interestingly enough, different items here that might appear to outsiders as coded “progressive” versus “conservative” are sometimes joined together. The results are fascinating. Very nearly all Churches of Christ are trending evangelical, but sometimes that very trend is a sign of a move in a politically progressive or theologically liberal direction, just as, sometimes, it’s the opposite. It’s case be case, congregation by congregation. Quite often a congregation is moving in two or more directions at once, and its own members don’t realize it until very late in the process.

I’ve written about all this at length elsewhere (and, I should add, I’ve drawn together and expanded those posts on Churches of Christ as catholic/evangelical/neither/both into an article that will be published soon in Restoration Quarterly). All that I want to say here is this. In the American context, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is well nigh impossible to know what “makes” a Church of Christ a Church of Christ beyond a given congregation’s self-definition. Any further necessary features—not to mention sufficient marks—will either immediately carve off a sizeable chunk of existing Churches of Christ or inadvertently include, as a Church of Christ, all kinds of “normie” American evangelical churches that the definition is meant to exclude.

Put it this way. If you learn that a neighbor or stranger or friend attends a Church of Christ, it’s not different in kind from learning that he or she attends a local evangelical or non-denominational church. You haven’t yet learned the relevant theological or moral or social or political information. What matters, what tells you something significant, is what comes next in the conversation, in answer to the following question: Well, what kind? Tell me about your church.

That’s how it is today, and only more so as each year passes. The transformation is happening, has happened, before our very eyes. It’s undeniable. But it has to be noticed, observed, commented on, to be seen for what it is. For it was not ever thus.

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

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?

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

The great Christian divide

There are two kinds of Christian, by which I mean, there are two ways of being Christian nourished by two types of Christian tradition. Each is defined by its stance or posture toward the Bible and the resulting formation of ordinary believers.

You could think of many names for both. Most are biased, polemical, prejudicial. It’s hard to give a neutral name to something you believe is either absolutely right or dead wrong.

Call the first one biblicist. Sometimes this view comes wrapped in the label of sola scriptura, but nuda scriptura seems more apt. Biblicism forms its adherents to believe, at least tacitly but usually consciously, three major things.

First, nothing but the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is authority for the church. What is not laid out verbatim, in so many words, cannot be decisive for Christian faith and morals. Second, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is best read without the mediation, guidance, or interposition of extra-biblical teaching. Whether you call this latter teaching “sacred tradition” or “church doctrine” or something else, it is bound to obstruct, distort, and/or mislead the reader of Scripture. Third and finally, the Bible’s clear, explicit teaching is meant to be read, understood, and put together by individual believers. The Bible, that is, should be read “alone” in more than one sense: unaccompanied by tradition or by other people. What is tradition, after all, except other people? (Sartre tells the biblicist what other people are.) More to the point, you are not supposed to be relying on or placing your trust in something or someone other than God, and God has said all that needs saying in the Bible. Biblicism isn’t per se anti-church—though it fails mightily in avoiding being anti-authority—but its ecclesiology is individualist at bottom. The Christian is a spiritual Descartes: alone in a room with a Bible, because alone in life with God. God’s relationship to each is immediate, except as mediated by faith, the presence of the Spirit, and the living word of the scriptures.

This is why, in biblicist settings, no doctrine—none whatsoever—is ever safe from challenge. If the biblicist is Descartes in practice, the ideal-type is Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other. Every Christian and church in history may have taught and believed X, but if someone in the room believes the Bible teaches not-X, then that belief gets a hearing. Not only gets one, but is encouraged to have one. Is encouraged, spiritually and imaginatively, to suppose that Christianity is the sort of thing that an individual believer, thousands of years after the fact, might discover, or re-discover, for the first time. Christianity as such does not preexist me, the Christian. The Bible alone does.

“What the church believes” and “what tradition teaches” and “what Christians have always held” are therefore category errors on such a view. It’s not just that doctrine and tradition are secondary to Scripture. They don’t have a seat at the table. They lack any and all standing, no matter how ancient, venerable, unanimous, or important. This is simply taken for granted by the biblicist. Occasionally, when the premise must be defended, a laundry list of historic errors on the part of the church is trotted out as dispositive proof. It’s half-hearted at best, though. The biblicist premise isn’t primarily negative. It’s positive. It’s rooted in claims about what the Bible is, what it is for, and how it should be read. Those are the foundation of biblicism, not the consequent denials and prohibitions.

The second, contrary view I’ll call catholic. It encompasses far more than the Roman church. It includes also the Orthodox, global Anglicanism, and most magisterial Protestants. For the catholic position, church doctrine is of momentous significance. If X has been believed always, everywhere, and by everyone, then at a minimum X is presumed by the church to be true, and is taught as such. Sometimes X arises to the level of formal irreversibility (being, that is, beyond reform); more often it is functionally irrevocable. Either way, there is a set of teachings that are nonnegotiable for Christian faith. They aren’t up for debate. If you dispute them, you aren’t a Christian; if you accept them, you are a Christian. This is not because the faith is exclusive (though, rightly understood, it is). It is because Christianity preexists you. It isn’t plastic, ever-newly malleable to each generation that arises. If it were, Christianity wouldn’t be anything at all; wouldn’t stand for anything at all; wouldn’t be worth joining in the first place. It’s worth joining because it’s solid, stable, reliable: a something-or-other.

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the objection to Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down. Mutatis mutandis for world religions and Christianity.

I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity, in its actual historical expressions, is unchanging. It’s not. Tradition, if it isn’t dead, is living. Tradition means not only preservation and conservation but adaptation, even mutation. All granted. I merely mean that, on the catholic view, Christianity does not await existence until you or I come along to build it from scratch from the blueprints of the Bible. It’s already there, before I’m born. I join it as it is or I don’t. I don’t get to make it in my image. If I do—that is, if I try—I’m doing it wrong. I’ve failed to understand the very thing I want to become a part of. And I’ve changed it beyond recognition in the process.

The catholic understanding of the Bible isn’t a denial or qualification of the Bible’s authority. On the contrary. There is no Christianity apart from the word of God. But the same Spirit that inspired the scriptures indwells God’s people. God has delegated authority to God’s people. I, the individual believer, do not presume to know—much less to decide—what Christianity is based on my private reading of the Bible. I defer to the church. The church tells me what Christianity is. The church tells me what to believe, because the church gives me the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In a catholic context, “this is what the church teaches” is a statement both (a) intelligible and (b) decisive, even as it is not (c) competitive with “this is what the Bible teaches.” For what the first means is: “this is what the church teaches the Bible teaches.” Who would imagine himself competent to discover what the Bible teaches on his own? What individual believer possesses the wherewithal, the holiness, the wisdom, the hermeneutical chops to sit down with the Bible and, all by her lonesome, figure it out? I’ve not yet met one myself.

This, it seems to me, is the great Christian divide. Not between Catholics and Protestants. Not between conservatives and liberals. Not between Western and global. But between biblicist and catholic. I can do business with catholic Christians, whatever our differences or disagreements. Whereas I increasingly find myself adrift with biblicists. I don’t mean I doubt their faith, their integrity, their commitment to Christ. I mean we find each other unintelligible. Each thinks the other is talking gibberish. It becomes clear that we lack shared first principles. The biblicist’s working premise and mine are opposed, and this make understanding difficult, not to mention collaboration or agreement. We are speaking different languages. And each of us supposes our language to be Christianese. Yet one of us is right and one of us is wrong. I doubt we can get very far without figuring that out. Until then, we’re doing little more than spinning our wheels.

Defining “culture”

I’ve been grateful for the responses I’ve seen to my Mere O essay “Once More, Church and Culture.” Andrew Wilson was particularly kind in a post about the piece.

I’ve especially appreciated folks understanding what I was (and was not) trying to do in it. Not to suggest Hunter’s typology is bad or discreditable. Certainly not to suggest an alternative singular image or approach. Rather, to suggest that the very search for one dominant or defining posture is a fool’s errand, not to mention historically and culturally parochial. I was worried the length and wending nature of the essay would mislead readers. I was wrong!

Alan Jacobs also liked the essay, but was left with one big question: What is “culture,” and why did I—why does anyone, in writing on the topic—leave it undefined? More to the point, “there is no form of Christian belief or practice that is not cultural through-and-through.” In which case it sounds rather odd to pit the church against something the church herself includes and which, in turn, includes the church.

Alan’s criticism is a legitimate one, and I don’t have any full-bodied defense of my unspecified use of the term. I do have a few quick thoughts about what I had in mind and why folks use the word generically in essays like this one.

First, “culture” is one of those words (as Alan agrees) that is nigh impossible to pin down. You know it when you see it. You discover the sense of what a person is referring to through their use. The term itself could call forth an entire lifetime’s worth of study (and has done so). In that case, it’s reasonable simply to get on with the discussion and trust we’ll figure out what we’re saying in the process.

And yet—this intuition may well be wrong, and its wrongness may be evidenced in the very interminability of the post-Niebuhrian conversation. Granted! I’m honestly having trouble, however, imagining everyone offering a hyper-specific definition of “culture” or avoiding the term altogether.

In any case, second, it may be true that Niebuhr made various errors in his lectures that became Christ and Culture, but I’m surprised that Alan thinks—if his tongue is not too far in cheek—that the book should be dismissed. My surprise notwithstanding, I engage Niebuhr in the essay not to defend him but to take up the ideas he put into circulation through his typology; or rather, to display the pattern in his approach, which became the template for so many who followed him.

Third, I would like to point out how I actually use the word “culture” in the essay. I do in fact mention it in the opening sentence, along with similar items in a grab-bag list meant to suggest a kind of comprehensive civic repertoire: “Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.” After that, I use the term exclusively in four ways: in scare quotes, in actual quotations, in paraphrase of an author’s thought, or in generic reference to “church and culture” writing—until the final few paragraphs. Here they are:

• “…Niebuhr, Hunter, and Jenson are right to see a dialectic at work in the church’s encounter with various cultures.”

• “As I see it, there is no one ‘correct’ type, posture, or model. Instead, the church has four primary modes of faithful engagement with culture.”

• “God is the universal Creator; the world he created is good; and he alone is Lord of all peoples and thus of all cultures.”

• “When and where the time is right, when and where the Spirit moves, the proclamation of the gospel cuts a culture to the bone, and the culture is never the same.”

• “…[my approach] does not prioritize work as the primary sphere in which the church encounters a culture or makes its presence known.”

• “The mission of the church is one and the same wherever the church finds itself; the same goes for its engagement with culture.”

• “Sometimes … the Spirit beckons believers, like the Macedonian man in the vision of St. Paul, to cross over, to enter in, to settle down, to build houses and plant vineyards. In other words, to inhabit a culture from the inside. Sometimes, however, the Spirit issues a different call…”

In my humble opinion, these uses of the term are clear. Either they are callbacks to the genre of “church and culture”/“engage the culture”/“church–culture encounter” writing, which I am in turn riffing on or deploying for rhetorical purposes (without any need for a determinate sense of the word). Or they are referring to a society or civilization in all its discrete particularity, as distinct from some other society or civilization.

Had Alan been the last editorial eye to read my essay before I handed it in, I would have cut “culture” from the first sentence and replaced most or all of these final mentions with “society” or “civilization.” I don’t think I would have defined “culture” from the outset, though I might have included a line about the term being at once inevitably underdetermined and unavoidable in writing on the topic, that is, on the church’s presence within and mission to the nations.

At the very least, I’ll be mindful of future uses of the term. It’s a slippery one, “culture” is, and I’m grateful to Alan for reminding me of the fact.

I’m in Mere O on church and culture

I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy, and Jake has just posted it online this morning. It’s titled “Once More, Church and Culture.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

Re-reading what I’ve written there (drafted last summer, I think), I’m inclined to say the opening seven paragraphs make for some of my better writing. It’s a potted history of Christendom before and in America, and how it continues to haunt Protestant reflection about “church and culture.” Part two of the essay takes up H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology and James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence.” Part three takes a stab at an alternative framework—but not one more single-label option that captures all contexts and circumstances. Read on to see more.

And once you’ve read it, go subscribe to the Mere O print magazine. It’s great!

Two further thoughts. First, some version of this essay has been rattling around in the back of my mind since January 2017, when I first taught a week-long intensive course called “Christianity and Culture.” I’ve taught it now every single January since. That’s seven total! Didn’t even miss for Covid. The texts have varied, but I’ve consistently had students read Hauerwas, Jenson, JDH (excerpts), JKAS (You Are What You Love), THW (Liturgy of the Ordinary), TIB (Strange Rites), Douthat (Bad Religion), Dreher (the old pre-book FAQ), Wilkinson/Joustra, Tisby, Cone, and Crouch. It always goes so well. And every Friday of the course, I conclude with, basically, what I’ve written in this essay: a set of typologies; a critique of them; and my own proposal. I’m grateful to Jake for letting me finally put it down in black and white.

Second, this essay has brought home to me how much this topic has dominated my thoughts, and therefore my writing, since I finished my dissertation six years ago. Specifically, the topic of the church in relation to society, which brings in its wake questions about Christendom, America, liberalism, and integralism, not to mention missiology, culture, technology, liturgy, and even anti-Judaism. Everything, in other words! For those who may be interested, here is an incomplete list of publications that bear on these matters and thus supplement this particular essay:

• Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Options 35 Years Ago” Mere Orthodoxy | 13 March 2017

• Public Theology in Retreat Los Angeles Review of Books | 20 September 2017

• Holy Ambivalence Los Angeles Review of Books | 1 March 2018

• The Church and the Common Good Comment | 17 January 2019

• The Specter of Marcion Commonweal | 13 February 2019

• A Better Country Plough | 4 August 2019

• Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic Mere Orthodoxy | 2 April 2020

• The Circumcision of Abraham’s God First Things | 1 January 2021

• When Losing Is Likely The Point | 18 June 2021

• Market Apocalypse Mere Orthodoxy | 25 August 2021

• Statistics as Storytelling The New Atlantis | 1 October 2021

• Still Supersessionist? Commonweal | 29 October 2021

• Jewish Jesus, Black Christ The Christian Century | 25 January 2022

• Unlearning Machines Comment | 24 March 2022

• Can We Be Human in Meatspace? The New Atlantis | 2 May 2022

• Another Option for Christian Politics, Front Porch Republic | 4 July 2022

• The Ruins of Christendom, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10 July 2022

• The Church in the Immanent Frame First Things | 14 July 2022

• The Bible in America (forthcoming in The Christian Century)

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

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: evangelical, not catholic

I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.

So that’s the good news: what I identified is real and recognized as such by others. More good news: CoC theology of the church and her sacraments is both good on the merits and in line with patristic and medieval teaching, rather than merely a recent innovation. Best of all, at least for some: We’re not evangelicals, like we’ve been saying all along!

Now for the bad news.

The bad news comes in two forms, one about CoC past and one about CoC future.

Regarding the former, the thing about CoC virtues, which broadly overlap with catholic tradition, is that they are the flip side of CoC vices. These vices likewise sometimes overlap with catholic vices. A high ecclesiology all too often trades on a sectarian ecclesiology: no one outside this church (rather than the church) will be saved. Hence the CoC’s justly earned reputation for supposing all other Christians to be damned, or at least very unlikely to be saved. The same goes for sacramental practice, which can verge on the obsessive, the mechanical, or both. If it’s even thinkable for a well-formed member of your ecclesial tradition to wonder seriously whether a person who died in a car accident on the way to being baptized would, as a result of thus not being baptized, go to hell, then you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong. Doubly so if your catechesis generates rather than relieves this anxiety. (My students are shocked to learn how open-handed actual Catholic doctrine is on this question: not only are unbaptized martyrs saved, but any person with the sincere intention to be baptized, who for reasons outside her control is kept from being baptized, is received by the Lord in death as though she had been baptized.) The same obsessive-compulsive severity can be found in “re”-baptizing someone whose hand or foot didn’t go all the way under during the first try—taking to a literal extreme the understanding of baptism as total immersion, and just thereby undermining the very point of once-for-all believers baptism.

I could go on: the granular scholasticism of kitchens in church buildings, church buildings in general, instruments in worship, paid parish preachers, and the rest. Anyone who was raised in churches of Christ or who grew up in an area with one on every corner knows what I’m talking about.

No church is perfect, however, nor any church tradition. The wheat and the tares grow together, as do the virtues and vices of any particular movement. That’s to be expected.

The second element of the bad news, though, is related to the first, which is why I mentioned it. It is true to say, as I did in my original post, that the CoC is more catholic than evangelical. That catholic sensibility still lingers on in some congregations, especially in members over 50. But it is dissipating, and fast. As I wrote, churches of Christ are currently in process of being absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that, if not already finished, will be completed in the next decade or two. It’s a fait accompli; the only question is the timing.

This CoC future is a function of CoC past. There is a reason why churches of Christ are becoming indistinguishable from non-denominational churches. Well, there are many reasons, but here’s one big one: The oldest three generations of CoC-ers finally got fed up with the sectarian fundamentalism in which they were raised. They saw that they were not the only Christians; that church history was not misery and darkness until 1801; that Stone-Campbell tradition was just that, a tradition, one like many others; that “being right” was not synonymous with “doing what we’ve always done”; and that “what we’ve always done” was not sufficient as a reason to keep on doing it.

Those are all true insights, and their fruit, across the last thirty years, has been lifting up mainstream churches of Christ from the sectarian muck in which it had been mired. Many experienced that lifting-up as a deliverance, even a liberation. They were in the light, having been in shadow and twilight for so long. They were grateful for the tradition they’d received; they were willing to remain in it; but they would contribute to its healthy evolution: from sect to tradition, from exclusivism to ecumenism, from dogma to generous orthodoxy. This would, in a way, honor the Stone-Campbell roots of churches of Christ, since those roots were about prioritizing Christian unity above all else.

Many welcomed, and continue to welcome, the resulting changes. But there were unintended consequences. Chief among them was the loss, on one hand, of the features that made churches of Christ distinctive in the larger ecclesial landscape; and, on the other, of the practical means of maintaining and handing on those very features to the next generation.

Here is the great irony. The upshot of rescuing the CoC from its worst vices was the loss of its greatest virtues—of what made it it in the first place.

Hence the CoC’s absorption into evangelicalism. And try as some might, there’s no arresting this process. Why? For the following reasons.

First, the CoC began as an anti-tradition tradition. This means there are no organs of authority for any one congregation besides the Bible, its elders, and its ministry staff. There is, in a sense, no tradition to which such a congregation might be faithful. It doesn’t exist. There’s no “there” there.

Second, even granting that, in one sense, there obviously is a “there” there—after all, churches of Christ have a history and founders and influential leaders—there are no reasons, internal to the tradition, why anyone should care. In a theological debate between two Orthodox theologians, it is valid and weighty to assert that St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, and St. Maximus are on one’s side. They’re not quite Scripture, but they’re close. Not so in a CoC context. If someone in a local congregation says, “I hear what you’re saying, but Stone-Campbell Movement Leader X once wrote Y,” the only reply necessary is, “So?” Moreover, the very point of “moving” the CoC beyond its sectarian postwar malaise was for it to be changed. But if such change is both possible and desirable, then crying “Halt!” because Proposed Change Z doesn’t accord with CoC tradition is nonsensical. You can’t sit on the branch you’ve already sawed off yourself.

Third, there is only one way of being anti-tradition (indeed, anti-creedal) with a congregationalist polity in America: it’s called evangelicalism. By definition you do not belong to a larger ecclesiastical body. By definition you have no larger set of authoritative canons or confessions or doctrines. By definition you are making it up as you go. We have a name for that in this here frontier land. It’s the E-word, God help us all. American evangelicalism is DIY religion through and through, and that’s the only route available to a tradition without a history, a church without a creed, a polity without authority—that is, authority beyond the Bible as read by a local group of staff and elders.

This is why flagship and even normie churches of Christ today look like carbon copies of their next-door-neighbor non-denom churches. (It’s why some of them have dropped the “…of Christ” from their buildings and websites, and why others are soon to follow.) Increasingly they’re ditching a cappella singing for CCM praise music; they’re placing far less of an emphasis on baptism as restricted to adults or as a sacrament of divine action, much less as necessary for salvation; and I’d be willing to wager that weekly communion, already felt to be gumming up the liturgical works, will be the last domino to fall in the coming years. What’s holding all of this together, anyway, is the oldest two generations. Once they pass away, and once younger people start asking (as they already are), “Why does this have to be weekly? Won’t it be more meaningful if we make it monthly instead?” you can set a timer for the eventual change. Remember, “we’ve always done it this way” no longer holds water as an answer.

For CoC leaders who don’t like the look of this trajectory, there are limited options. You can’t bootstrap an ecclesiastical hierarchy into existence ex nihilo. Nor can you DIY yourself out of DIY-ness. That’s the DIY trap. If you make yourself just-a-little-progressive-mainline, you’re not mainline, you’re just progressive evangelical—the worst of all possible worlds. Besides, if the point was to avoid being evangelical, you’ve failed. If, by contrast, you make yourself just-a-little-traditional-catholic, you’re not catholic, you’re just traditional—but what does that mean? You can’t be “traditional” as an optional extra chosen by lay vote or ministerial preference; tradition either is or is not authoritative. And if it just happens to be a congregation’s preference today, who’s to say it will remain their preference tomorrow?

In short, the question isn’t whether churches of Christ already are, or soon will be, one more tributary in the great evangelical delta. They are and they will be. It’s whether they will even exist once the process of absorption is complete. For many congregations are closing their doors, as the CoC rolls in the U.S. decline; many others are dropping the name; others still are dropping the distinctives that make them CoC (whether or not they still claim the name). Doubtless a few will remain, repping the old line. But they won’t amount to a statistically significant number in the scene of American Christianity. At that point—2045? 2060?—this whole conversation will be moot. Mostly there won’t be churches of Christ around anymore; and those that exist won’t look like they once did, a century prior. The transmutation to evangelicalism will be total.

I know plenty of folks in churches of Christ who see this as either a good thing or, at most, neutral. Their CoC catechesis was weaker on the catholic stuff and stronger on low-church ecumenism, marked by things like missionary flexibility, freedom from the authority of tradition, aversion to creeds and confessions, openness to change, inattention to history, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a high priority on spiritual unity and personal faith. American evangelicalism has all these in spades. This helps to explain the curious fact that, for most CoC congregations, the shift from catholic to evangelical has been so swift, so striking, yet so smooth, devoid (for the most part) of dispute and strife. Arguments have centered on culture-war flashpoints like gender rather than creedal doctrine or sacramental theology.

Yet this shift leaves the decidedly non-evangelical folks who remain in churches of Christ more or less homeless, exiles in their own spiritual household. But because the writing’s on the wall—because there’s no putting the evangelical cat back in the catholic bag—there’s nothing, really, to do. You can accept the trend lines, hunker down, and grin and bear it. Or, as I concluded in the previous post, you can leave.

As I see it, by and large those who stay will be those who resonate with evangelicalism, and those who leave will be those who long for catholic doctrine and practice. The sorting has already been happening, quietly, the last twenty years; it should be done, I’d say, in the next twenty. Some will leave who’d prefer to stay, and vice versa. But for the most part, that’s how it’ll shake out.