There are various Blogs dealing with the issue of the Emergent Chruch (EC) and their "borrowing" from Roman Catholic (RC) and Orthodox traditions. I have not followed everything in detail nor read all that has been said, since Tripp clued me into the conversation at Blogodoxy. And Clifton has some links here.
I am on the edge of EC, in some sense Reconciler could possibly be pigeon holed there, and Tripp, members of our congregation, and myself have taken part in Up/Rooted the local EC conversation. However, my journey as a Christian has long been in conversation with Roman Catholicsim, and my adult journey has been in conversation with both Roman Cathocism and Orthodoxy. Orthodox and Roman Catholics have and continue to have a deep and profound influence and effect on my faith. I speak to this discussion of whether or not the EC folk should just run straight to Orthodoxy (or Roman Catholicism) and thus return to the ancient faith from the POV of one who is Protestant and has been influenced by Orthodoxy but has remained Protestant.
Ecclesiology is certainly central here. I think it is on this point that any leaving my tradition would require being convinced of either RC or Orthodox ecclesiology. However, there are obstacles: one my experience of the Spirit and that my tradition taught me to love Christ and the Church (note not just my tradition and denomination), and is not incompatible with the seven ecumenical councils (so far as I understand them) and thus I do not see that I am out of communion with nor that I ever have been out of communion with the Chruch. My sense is that this is also the experience of the EC. What I and (I understand) the EC reject in Protestantism is the false claim that Protestantims (in one form or all of its forms) is the Chruch and that some how in the 16th Century the Church was resurected as Protestatism. However, and this was a relization that kept me from becoming Roman Catholic in colege, if you read the reformers carefully they were not saying this, they claimed continuity that they claimed the corrupt papacy of the 16th century lacked.
Then there is also, from the protestant side competing cliams of continuity: the Orthodox and other easter churchs and Roman Catholicism all claiming to be The Church. Historicaly speaking we know that divisions have occured from early and in the case of the Copts and Armenians it is unclear that these divisions were simply due to heresy as much as misunderstanding -- liguistic and cultural. In some sense the division between Rome and Easter Orthodoxy can also be (at least from a Protestant reading) largely chalked up to linguistic an cultural misunderstandings. Rome, Easter Orthodox, Copts, Armenians etc. seemt to all be able to claim in one way or another continuity with the Apostles.
I am not arguing for some ecclesiology nor saying that this historical reality keeps me from responsibly looking into and seeking the truth and to seeking out the fullness of the Church. however, claims of continuity are vague, and it seems to me historically true to say that St. Paul did not use the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, so it isn't even that Orthodoxy is this unchanging monolith, nor that St Peter was Pope in the way Pope John Paul II is Pope (assuming it isn't anachronistic to call St. Peter a pope). This isn't to say that historical change negates claims of continuity but that if you admit historical change as part of the reality of continuity (as seems to me is patently obvious and uncontroversial) then claims and arguments concerning continuity and discontinuity are more nuanced. Claims of continuity are not patently obvious, unless you are already Orthodox or RC. Thus, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to claim that my writing icons is already evidence of my being in communion with and in continuity with the church in its fullness. Now, it is also not necessarily evidence of this, but something is going on beyond simple "borrowing". Borrowing of course assumes that there is absolute discontinuity and lack of connection. Something at this poitn I would deny.
II am just gliding over the surface of some of the historical problems EC folk might have with either an RC or Orthodox call to abandon thier traditions all togther for RC or Orthodoxy. Of course either RC or Orthodox ecclesiology might eventual make sense to me, and some in the EC. So by all means Keep to your guns but also understand there are obsticals and they don't all reside on the Protestant side of things. Let me just say that you wade arround in Orthodoxy long enough and you suddenly find your self confronted with the issue of jurisdictions and the ways in which Orthodoxy is tied to ethnicity (at least in the US) and this seems to contradict its claims to be simply and without complication the Church. From an outside observers POV sometimes Orthodoxy and Roman Catholcism seem to be as much united as Protestants (or equally divided). Granted you might claim theological purity, but isn't that supposed to manifest in conduct? My point is that from where I sit becoming orthodox is simply to take up the same problems of Christianity I have as a Protestant and simply dress them in vestments while speaking Old Chruch slavonic and Greek, instead of Latin or German.
Another point is that evangelicals have been trained in the experience of faith. To say to me that I am a Christian that my faith is true that my baptism is true baptism but to deny that I am part of the Body of Christ seem absurd on the surface. In a way I understand and respect the Orthodox and RC insistance to the contrary. But again given that there are two representatives of the Ancient Chruch available to me again a more ancient division in Christianty than the Protestant produces an obstacle to ecclesiological claims.
It does not seem contradictory for me to claim that I have faith in Christ, that I am filled with the Holy Spirit and that my tradition shows evidence of life of the Spirit, and then to jump to to say that in some sense my tradition and I are part of the Church, and that some continuity remains with the apostles.
Thus it is not contradictory from this POV to take up writing Icons seeking to live into ancient liturgyies to claim St Basi, St Gregory etc. (I could set off a whole list but I will leave these two that came to me off thetop of my head), as compatriots with whom I am in fellowship.
What has not been taken into account is that EC is not simply about disaffection with the status quo but a sense that the Church is larger than this or that movement. That is what I see in the EC is in fact a sense that there is continuity without the need to return to the primitive church, or New Testament Church, in some prestine fashion, but that we are already in continuity with the community that was founded by Jesus and the Apostles and that we should be living into that fulness and in fact to do so is to be relavant in our time and culture. (Now I will also say that there are EC folk who are not thinking in this way).
Lastly, I will say that it may be true that many in the EC may be on a journey to Orthodoxy or RC. I will even admit that at times it does seem that in a few years I will be myself at the doors of Orthodoxy. Yet, I know that I am not there, and on other days my entire being tells me this isn't a journey back but forward, that I am burried and raised with Christ, that the Spirit witnesses to my spirit that I am precisely where I am supposed to be. It may be in fact that both are true.
So, perhaps you are right EC folk and myself are on a journey and we will find ourselves some day at the doors of the True Church realizing that we have been journeying there along even though we believed our journey was other wise. My hunch is that those of you in Orthodoxy could not have taken a short cut to where you are now, perhaps you should stop insisting that those of us who seem to be on the way take your suggested detours.
All I can tell you is that I am not at the doors of Orthodoxy yet, and that your arguments do not yet convince me that I am outside of the Church. Their good arguments don't get me wrong, I simply don't yet share all the presupositions and those presupositions contradict my experience of my faith in Christ and my love for the Church. Thus from my perspective and from the perspective I suspect of many EC, I am not borrowing but simply living into the fullness of the faith I have always had since my baptism at one month old, which I have and continue to grow into. Even so don't stop claiming what you believe to be true, and I wont stop insisting on the truth of how I have come to the faith, by the grace of God, as it has come to me through my Protestant tradition and church. All our ecclesiology's present us with tensions that are not resolved through argument. And so we pray, for each other (I hope), for the world, for the revelation of the spotless Bride of Christ the Chruch, one, holy, cahtolic, and apostolic. Lord have mercy.
Larry:
ReplyDeleteThe claims of Orthodoxy are not predicated on the fact that we use the exact same liturgies as did St. Paul. We know that that is not the case (though the structure of the liturgy is almost assuredly the same).
Rather, the claims of Orthodoxy are precisely predicated on the basis of being the exact same living organism (historically and spiritually) that Christ and the Apostles have founded.
We believe this claim can be substantiated on the bases of history, doctrine, apostolic succession, ect. But these are manifestations of the organic reality that makes the Orthodox claim true (if, it is, indeed, true--which as you know I think is).
Clif,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification. I do understand this. I said what I did in my post because someone (not you) in the conversation referenced seemed to appeal to a more static sense of continuity surrounding the liturgy.
(perhaps at somepoint you could comment more on what you mean when you say the structure is the same.)
The claim of being the exact same organism seems common place to me. At least as I have been lead to understand Lutheran and thus my denominations understanding of the church, it is an organism, the Body of Christ. That organism didn't cease to be nor did it come back into existence at some point. Nor are any of the denominations some form of refounding, recapture etc. (now I do understand that some Protestant sects may make these claims). The church was born at Pentecost and has continued as a living organism up and until this day.
My post was not an attempt to deny the Orthodox their claim to this living organism the church, but to say that myself and I believe many in the EC (most of those I have met) aren't simply doing this because they wish to be relavent and cutting edge but because there is the understanding that we are part of that living organism though our traditions in part or in whole have not always comprehended the extent of the church.
The appropriation that is being critiqued as borrowing I think is in fact a manifestation of the belief that we are part of that living organism the church that has been since Pentecost.
Now admitedly just believing so doesn't make it so. There are as you say manifestations of this organic reality. The desire to show the connection that is believed to be there I think is one such manifestation. What I am trying to say is that my faith in Christ and the Church was nurtured such that I recognize a continuity, and I see the Spirit at work in my denomination and my own life, from where I sit I see these as well as mamifestations of that organic reality, the Church.
It is not the Orthodox claim of continuity that is problematic for me,but the denial of any sort of continuity to anyone else.
Emergent/Emerging Churchers are addressing the problem of "What's Wrong with Evangelical Theology."
ReplyDeleteThe problem with their grab-bag approach (aka "borrowing") is that they for the most part remain evangelical Protestant (Baptist, Reformed, etc.) while seeking rites and accoutrements from other confessions that will enhance their evangelical Protestant experience but not challenge or change it.
For all of their borrowing, most will choose to stand outside of the Church and demand acceptance by the Church on their own terms instead of submitting themselves in humility. It is the Protestant way.
The ethos of their "borrowing" follows the same way. They'll take something from the Orthodox Church and then prefix it with "nu" or "new" and try to make it their own. The new/nu prefix translates: "stripped of anything that I don't like or will force me to give up my own subjective authority."
Excerpts from:
What's Wrong with Evangelical Theology?
Peter J. Leithart
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9608/opinion/leithart.html
Evangelicals entered the mainstream of American life during the late 1970s and "almost immediately" lost their ability to define themselves theologically.
Modernity's separation of public and private has limited evangelicals' beliefs "to matters of private experience, increasingly shorn of their distinctive worldview, and increasingly withdrawn from what was external and public."
Ultimately, "being evangelical has come to mean simply that one has had a certain kind of religious experience that gives color to the private aspects of daily life but in which few identifiable theological elements can be discerned or, as it turns out, are necessary."
The theological wheel has turned again in the same circle: "Evangelicals, no less than the Liberals before them whom they have always berated, have now abandoned doctrine in favor of 'life.'"
Evangelicalism is, after all, often defined as a branch of Christianity that gives particular emphasis to certain aspects of Christian experience: spiritual rebirth, conversion, and a personal relationship to Christ. Spend a little time among evangelicals, and you are sure to learn about people who believe all the right doctrine but are not "real"-which is to say, born-again- Christians. Long before neo-evangelicalism, long before the rise of the Christian right, long before the "Toronto blessing," revivalism gave American Protestantism its distinctive experiential shape, as wave after wave of anti-intellectual New School, New Light, and New Whatever movements were accepted and, paradoxically, accorded theological legitimation.
...evangelicals are drawing "increasingly injurious" conclusions from the appropriate emphasis on a believer's personal relationship with Christ: "They have proceeded to seek assurance of faith not in terms of the objective truthfulness of the biblical teaching but in terms of the efficacy of its subjective experience." Not only in the use of testimonies but in hymnody as well, evangelicalism is "changing direction to reflect this experience-centered focus."
...evangelicalism oscillates between...emphasizing assent to propositional truth one moment, then insisting on personal experience of the new birth as a (perhaps the) central reality of Christianity.
Evangelicalism, however, has little sense of the "cultural-linguistic" dimension of Christianity... In this approach, religion is not merely a system of propositions nor a symbolic expression of natural and universal religious experience; religion is instead a comprehensive interpretive scheme, embodied in narrative and ritual, which structures human experience and thought. From this viewpoint, Christianity is indeed seen as a "life," but as a communal life that includes not only a system of ritual and worship and a way of living, but also a way of speaking and thinking.
Doctrine and theology can take a very high profile in a cultural- linguistic approach, but doctrine would not be the sole mark of true Christianity.
An evangelical understanding of theology and church life in a cultural-linguistic mode could avoid the intellectualist extreme of a cognitive approach as well as the irrationalist extreme of the expressivist model.
A cultural-linguistic conception of Christianity highlights the need for evangelical sacramental and liturgical theology.
Evangelicals well understand how doctrines and moral standards shape and define a community, but their instinctive anti-ritualism leaves them bereft of the theological tools required for understanding how rites mold, sustain, and nourish the Church.
Evangelicals typically examine ritual only for enhancing individual experience. At the risk of sounding pretentiously postmodern, evangelicals would be served by reflections toward a "meta-liturgics," a liturgical theology that does not ask, "What is the warrant for this gesture?" or "Must we say these words?" but instead seeks the meaning and status of ritual action as such.
From the cultural-linguistic perspective, rites are as important as doctrines in defining a community.
Rites... are not mere external decorations but the means through which the interpretive pattern of the religion is exhibited, transmitted, and interiorized.
In this perspective the narrative and ritual patterns of Christianity do not merely express prior religious experience but give shape to experience and even form the conditions of the possibility of Christian experience.
Perhaps we are not going too far to suggest that the shape of evangelicalism depends on its answer to the question of infant baptism, which sharply poses the question of whether it is possible for external rites to shape experience, rather than merely expressing it.
Emerging/Emergents attempt to force the round peg (a rite from a non-Protestant confession)into the square hole of evangelical Protestantism (the latest "hip" incarnation, that is).
ReplyDeleteThey want and need the "cultural linguistic" dimension to their faith, the rites "through which the interpretive pattern of the religion is exhibited, transmitted, and interiorized" but they take the rites that exhibit, transmit and interiorize Orthodoxy NOT protestantism in any form!
Will the borrowing of our rites change them into Orthodox or will they change our rites into some bastard form of protestant expressiion?
anonymous,
ReplyDeleteYour posting here is interesting, and I hope to return to your points and the extensive exerpt you posted.
At the moment let me say that my initial reaction is that you are simply saying the same thing Clifton and others at Blogodoxy were saying: you simply are reiterating the same either or dilema and attempting to gore me on the horns of that dilema. However what is lacking is an argument for this either/or. You assume Orthodoxy is simply without complication and with firm impermiable barier the Church. What I question is the ability of orthodoxy to make this unequivical claim. Yet this claim is rarely argued for and is usualy presuposed and the begining of the argument. "You should become orthodox and not remain protestant because we are the church and you are outside the church." This is an assertion and I understand the thought, but it is not an argument. "The from the beginning" asertion is convincing to some "primitivist" protestants who have no real concept of historical development within the Christian faith, but it isn't going to fly with us evangelical prostestants who come out of the magisterial reformation and have a greater sense of our connection with the whole tradition of the faith even if we would give priority to Scripture over that of tradition.
It would be nice if someone would actually address my issue and stop simply reiterating the assertion that Orthodoxy= The Church. Since it is this simple equation that I find unconvincing.
Re: "...it isn't going to fly with us evangelical prostestants who come out of the magisterial reformation and have a greater sense of our connection with the whole tradition of the faith even if we would give priority to Scripture over that of tradition."
ReplyDelete"Suppose all EMERGENTS to be quite Orthodox; suppose their creed and faith quite concordant with ours; the mode and process by which that creed is or has been attained a Protestant one; a simple act of the understanding...Were you to find all truth, you would have found nothing; for we alone can give you that without which all would be vain - the assurance of truth."
+ Bishop Kallistos Ware quoting Alexei Khomiakov in his correspondence with the then- Anglican, William Palmer (The Inner Kingdom, 2000, p.15-16).
I substituted Emergents for "Anglicans" in the original, but it still reads the same.
Re: "...from where I sit I see these as well as mamifestations of that organic reality."
ReplyDeleteIt's as if you were quoting Luther himself!
Check out:
The Seat of the Reformation
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/22/wlav22.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/10/22/ixportal.html
and these:
Martin Luther's Toilet Flushed Out
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
Oct. 25, 2004 — German archaeologists have discovered the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation — a stone toilet* on which the constipated Martin Luther wrote the Ninety-Five Theses that launched the creation of Europe's Protestant churches
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041025/luther.html
Luther's lavatory thrills experts
Martin Luther was candid about his constipation
Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3944549.stm
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From where I stand, I see protestantism (in all of its myriad incarnations including this present "Emergent" one) as manifestations of an "organic reality" of a different sort.
"The Church cannot be a harmony of discords; it cannot be a numerical sum of Orthodox, Latins, and Protestants. It is nothing if it is not perfect inward harmony of creed and outward harmony of expression (not withstanding local differences in the rite). The question is, not whether Latins and Protestants have erred so fatally as to deprive individuals of salvation, which seems to be often the subject of debate; — surely a narrow and unworthy one, inasmuch as it throws a suspicion on the mercy of the Almighty. The question is whether they have the truth, and whether they have retained the ecclesiastical tradition unimpaired. If they have not, where is the possibility of unity?"
ReplyDelete- Alexei Khomiakov
I see you have mentioned jargon in your blog. I have a jargon web site that seeks to decode all sorts of jargon. Can you help add a section? Great write up on your blog - keep us informed and lets bsut the jargon.
ReplyDelete