Dr. Platypus

The February edition of Baptists Today contained a letter to the editor expressing one Baptist’s opinion of ecumenical catholicity. In his words, BT “really opened a serious can of worms” in its December issue by running an article suggesting that Baptists could stand to be a bit less legalistic when it comes to receiving new members who were first discipled in other Christian denominations that practiced infant baptism. In the words of this letter-writer,

It is quite ironic that on the 400th anniversary of Baptists, one of their major publications should give space to attacks on believer’s baptism. With the December issue, the traditional definition of a Baptist church, “a body of baptized believers,” goes out the window.

It is also quite ironic that, in making this charge, this brother is found to accuse (among others) John Bunyan, one of the biggest names in Baptist history, of betraying the “traditional definition of a Baptist church”—for Bunyan was an advocate of the same policy of “open membership” that the offending article proposed nearly 400 years ago! In fact, if the letter-writer had acquainted himself with George R. Beasley-Murray’s Baptism in the New Testament—an exegetical tour de force by a Baptist scholar of impeccable academic and ecclesiastical credentials—he would have known that receiving Methodist, Catholic, etc. members without requiring re-baptism has in fact long been the majority opinion among British Baptists. That doesn’t mean that “open membership” is the correct policy for Baptist churches to embrace (although I think it is), but it does mean that some Baptists have thought so since the 1600s, and in some parts of the world the majority of Baptists still do today.

On this Shrove Tuesday, however, I mostly want to discuss the second part of the letter. After some rather condescending remarks about Christians in other denominations, the writer continues:

Also, not content to wreak so much havoc in one area, this same issue of Baptists Today tries to justify the liturgical ceremonialism and the papist trappings that our predecessors in the faith rejected and condemned.

The writer has a problem with liturgical ceremonialism. So do I when it gets in the way of an authentic relationship with God. The thing is: everybody has a liturgy and a ceremony! Growing up, there were certain phrases that I knew were going to be a part of any prayer that certain people prayed—even though they were all ostensibly praying extemporaneously! “Father we just want to….” “Lead, guide, and direct….” “Bless the giver and the gift….” You get the idea. We all get into ruts. That’s as true for the preacher or deacon in the sport coat as it is the one in the Geneva gown or the alb. Perhaps a new pastor at this writer’s church will some day suggest fiddling around the the order of service they’ve used for the past fifty years and we’ll see how much ceremonialism he’s willing to justify.

As to the “papist trappings” (do people still use the word “papist”?), I have pointed out in my old series on Ancient Christian Worship that many of the specific customs that apparently offend the writer go back to pre-Constantinian times. So do many customs that I have never seen or even heard of being practiced in any Baptist church—the sign of the cross, remembrances of departed saints, daily Communion, etc. (Okay, I make the sign of the cross when I receive Communion, but I don’t think anybody else does.)

The writer is of course correct that historically Baptists have rejected or even condemned these practices. But where do you draw the line? The Charleston tradition of Baptist worship featured clerical gowns, a structured order of service, responsive readings, and so forth. It was far more “liturgical” or “ceremonial” than the evangelical fervor of the Sandy Creek tradition. The New Testament itself indicates the first Christians continued to follow certain liturgical ceremonies they learned from their Jewish heritage: chanting the psalms, set hours of prayer, set prayer forms (such as the Lord’s Prayer), etc. Once you concede that God might in fact be honored by people putting some forethought into worshiping well, you open the door to at least considering the possibility that some customs of the greater church might be worth reclaiming. Just because some people might do them emptily doesn’t mean we can’t try to do them right.

It seems that some Baptists no longer identify Lent as the useless self-mortification and works (autosoterism) that it is. Most Baptists have stood for “faith alone” and rejected such ascetic practices as fasting, meatless Fridays, cutting tonsures in the hair, clerical garb, flagellations, and acts of penance as being the outward show of Pharisees.

When I was young, I did in fact identify Lent as “useless self-mortification and works.” Of course, that was before I knew anything about it! Since then, I have had the opportunity to read the Bible, where I learned that fasting was a common practice in both Testaments, and that it happened sometimes privately and individually and sometimes corporately as part of a group. (The members of the leadership group at Antioch were fasting together when God instructed them to set aside Paul and Barnabas for missionary work.) I also learned—and I admit I learned this as much from personal experience as from biblical study—that I’m not especially good at being holy or resisting temptation, so it would probably be a good idea for me to give special attention to these areas from time to time.

Like all Baptists (at least all the ones I know), I believe that a person’s standing before God is a matter of grace. I categorically reject the idea that anything I can do can make God love or accept me any more or less than he already does. But I also have a theology that is bigger than the “plan of salvation.” God loves me just the way I am, but he loves me too much to let me stay this way. Therefore, it is appropriate for me to search both Scripture and the witness of Christians who came before me for wisdom that will help me grow in my discipleship. Since I am firmly rooted in the “Free Church” tradition, I consider myself free to embrace whatever helps me keep my focus on Jesus, be it fasting (Mt 6:16-18; Acts 13:3), meatless Fridays (a subset of fasting), meaningful haircuts (Acts 18:18), symbolic clothing (Rev 4:4), or appropriate acts of restitution or penance (Mt 5:23-26; Jas 5:16). (I can’t find a biblical justification for flagellation, nor do I want to go looking for one. But seriously, has this person ever observed Baptist Christians literally whipping themselves in their religious fervor?)

He concludes,

I am Baptist. If I needed ritualism or if I thought God enjoyed seeing people lighting candles (magical vehicles for sending up prayers through sacrificial flames), I would join some faith tradition that features such religious frippery.

I am also a Baptist. I don’t need ritualism in the sense that I need more than the grace of God, but as a card-carrying member of the human race, I do need religious forms of some kind—that is a fact of anthropology and sociology.  I can’t get away from them, so I had better admit that fact and get on with choosing good ones. I doubt God cares one way or another about whether people light candles, but I know he likes the prayers that accompany them. And I do know (because I’ve read Exodus and Revelation) that God loves symbolic acts of worship.

Therefore, tomorrow night I’ll join with the other members of my Baptist church in receiving ashes on my forehead as a reminder of my humanity, my mortality, and my desperate need for more of Christ, his teachings, and his grace.

Michael Byrd shares a very nice quotation from Kevin Vanhoozer:

“Catholicity” signifies the church as the whole people of God, spread out over space, across cultures, and through time. “We believe in one … catholic church.” The evangelical unity of the church is compatible with a catholic diversity. To say that theology must be catholic, then, is to affirm the necessity of involving the whole church in the project of theology. No single denomination “owns” catholicity: catholicity is no more the exclusive domain of the Roman Church than the gospel is the private domain of evangelicals. Catholic and Evangelical belong together. To be precise “catholic” qualifies “evangelical.” The gospel designated a determinate word; catholicity, the scope of its reception. “Evangelical” is the central notion, but “catholic” adds a crucial antireductionist qualifier that prohibits any one reception of the gospel from becoming paramount. (Drama of Doctrine, 27).

To those of you who would embrace both terms: Do you think of yourself as an evangelical catholic or as a catholic evangelical?

Which is only a problem because I grew up in, and continue to identify with, a spiritual tradition that has often settled for homodoxy instead.

Fortunately, here in the heart of central Georgia is a Baptist church that is at least taking baby steps toward orthodoxy as Fr. Peters describes it: the liturgical year, spiritual formation, etc. Heck, we even have Sunday school classes that study ancient Christian psalmody and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, and we’re going to be offering a class this summer on the Apostles Creed.

Of course, if you asked anybody in the merely homodox Georgia Baptist Convention, they’d probably tell you we were a bunch of “liberals.” Go figure.

Good words from my favorite Baptist contemplative, Jeanie Miley:

When I was growing up, Mary the mother of Jesus was consigned to a minor role, not because her role was minor, but because in my tradition there was a fear of the worship of Mary.  That fear of Mary and the neglect of her story sort of oozed and leaked over into other attitudes and practices within my religious tradition, but ’tis the season to focus on other things, I think.

Now that I’ve got some history at putting away childish things and attempting to grow up, I”m incredulous about that fear of Mary.  When I expressed to my spiritual director, Bishop Mike Pfeifer, that there were some in my tradition who held to the idea that sin came into the world through a woman, he quickly said, “But, Jeanie, the Savior also came into the world through a woman.”

That statement he made poured the oil of grace over a painful wound in my soul.

By all means, read it all.

By far the most interesting thing I’ve seen written about Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Vatican’s Apostolic Constitution establishing a structure for welcoming disenfranchised Anglo-Catholics while allowing them to preserve some of their specifically Anglican traditions, is Dan Martins’ post, “Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth.”

I clearly do not have a dog in this “fight,” but I also long for greater visible unity within the church, and think Fr. Martins may be right that the Pope’s move may actually not have been bold enough.

Sad.

An InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter can look very different in the fall than it did the previous spring. But the chapter at George Washington University (GWU) in the nation’s capital is dealing with change of a more uncomfortable kind than absent graduates and incoming freshmen.

Shortly before students left for summer vacation, the D.C. chapter split when all ten student leaders resigned to form a new campus ministry called University Christian Fellowship. More than half of the chapter’s roughly 100 students joined them. At issue was student leaders’ worry that the national ministry confuses the gospel by cooperating with Roman Catholics, and has a mission statement that Catholics could sign without violating church teaching on the doctrine of justification—how sinners are declared righteous before God.

As an “un-anathematized” Protestant (at least provisionally; I agree with the Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in principle, but haven’t really dug into the details), it saddens me to see fellow believers so eager not to find points of commonality with their brothers and sisters in Christ. For example, consider the following consecutive paragraphs in the article:

“If you buy into [N. T.] Wright’s approach to covenantal theology, then you’ve already taken three steps toward the Catholic Church. Keep following the trail and you’ll be Catholic,” said [Taylor] Marshall, who blogs at PaulIsCatholic.com. “Salvation is sacramental, transformational, communal, and eschatological. Sound good? You’ve just assented to the Catholic Council of Trent.”

Wright himself finds strange the notion that he’s leading people to Rome. “I am sorry to think that there are people out there whose Protestantism has been so barren that they never found out about sacraments, transformation, community, or eschatology. Clearly this person needed a change. But to jump to Rome for that reason is very odd,” he said. The best Reformed, charismatic, Anglican, and even some emerging churches have these emphases, he said.

How do Protestants not know that their historic theology goes far deeper and wider than the immediate concerns of the Reformation of the sixteenth century? Never mind; stupid question.

Related:

• When Protestants Attack
• I’m Not Crossing the Tiber, but My Toes Are in the Thames

Saints!  I think that basically, from the church’s point of view, what we need to do is form saints – people of faith, hope and love.

Thus says Glenn Hinson, one of my professors at the Seminary formerly known as Southern, and one of the major influences in my early appreciation of both patristics and Christian spirituality.

Thomas Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind is obviously born of deep passion to recover the roots of early African Christianity and especially to encourage African scholars and theologians themselves to dig deeper into the literary sources and make their own case for the central role Africans played in the shaping of the consensual orthodoxy of the patristic era. Oden explains how his work as editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series led him to realize how many early Christian thinkers—not only Augustine and Athanasius but Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Lactantius, Optatus, and many others—were products of an African cultural milieu.

He argues passionately that these figures were no less “African” because they mainly lived in the northermost districts of the continent, and that most if not all of them were both culturally and ethnically at home with the various indigenous African peoples—Berber, Punic, Coptic, Nilotic, Ethiopian, etc.—who lived and died far from the Hellenized cities in which they often ministered, and among whom they often lived. (Athanasius’ frequent exiles among the various Nilotic peoples of Upper Egypt comes to mind.) From these major population centers, Christianity spread into Africa’s interior, as far as the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda and certainly to the Sudan and Ethiopia during pre-Constantinian times.

In the end, to deny that these giants of faith were truly “Africans” or that their practice of the Christian faith was an “indigenous African religion” is to strip these terms of any rational meaning. Oden’s fondest wish would be for young African Christians from throughout the continent would reclaim these figures as their own. He is, in fact, rather distressed that so many African theologians have been influenced more by European and North American modernism (and postmodernism) than by the indigenous, nearly 2,000-year-old Christian traditions of their own continent.

Oden’s case is convincing as far as it goes, but it is really more of a Prolegomenon to the study of early African Christianity. (And he has launched a research project to continue the work, Early African Christianity.)When it comes to specifics, Oden is disappointingly sparse. In part, this is surely because many of the primary sources, written originally not only in Greek and Latin but also Coptic, Ge’ez, and—yes—Arabic have yet to be translated.

Still, I would have wished for at least a little bit of help in understanding what precisely Oden sees as the “genius” of early African Christianity: what it was that the early church learned in Africa before teaching it to the broader Christian world. If you read something like Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization or even George G. Hunter’s The Celtic Way of Evangelism, you come away with at least a tentative sense of what makes “Celtic Christianity” tick. In How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, there is occasional reference to the “African metaphors” that shaped the thinking of Athanasius and the rest, but there is very little meat on those bones. The nearest we get to specific examples of how African culture left its mark on its first Christian adherents is (1) a moving chapter on the African martyrs as a challenge to the idea that orthodoxy is nothing more than the truth as told by the “winners,” in which one finds (2) a single reference (tied to the continuity of the communion of saints) to the value of honoring the ancestors, and also (3) this tantalizing sentence: “These metaphors—Eucharist, faithfulness to death, martyrdom and ascetic discipline—were constantly interwoven in early African exegesis of Scripture” (123).

In the end, a more accurate title for the book would have been achieved by dropping its first word. Oden is clear that “Africa Shaped the Christian Mind.” As to how, a reader will have to do a bit of additional homework to find out. For my part, I think I’m going to start by re-reading The Spirituality of African Peoples by Peter J. Paris to sensitize myself to the key themes he lays out, then attempt to bring them into my subsequent readings and re-readings of early African theologians.

Related:

• How to Read the Bible like a Pagan

This report from an Episcopal priest about the upheavals in his denomination resonated so strongly with my experiences in the Southern Baptist Convention of the late 80’s/early 90’s that I had to share it. Just switch the liberal and conservative tags and you’ll understand what a bunch of folks were going through in Baptistland as they felt their denominational home had abandoned them and turned them into outcasts.

Here is an observation worthy of careful consideration.

One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may “love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise”. That is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the challenge of the Gospel.

Every Christian knows that this sentiment is true. We all love and desire things that God forbids—not because God is out to get us but because, if we ever received them, it would be harmful to our relationships with God, others, and/or self. Therefore, the challenge of the gospel is to invite God to change our desires, our loves, to line up with God’s holiness. And we pray for God’s grace beforehand, knowing the road is sometimes hard and we will not always succeed. And we pray as well for patience and a forgiving, welcoming spirit toward our brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing that their battles may be far harder than our own.

Oh, and here’s the statement in context.