Fleshing this Out...

Christ Over Us: An Example of Submission and Mission

It seems to me that the Western church has functioned with a radically flawed ecclesiology - a systemic error that has to yet to be thoroughly uprooted.

The Nicean and Post-Nicean fathers essentially established the doctrines of theology proper and Christology, over and agaist the heresies of Gnosticism, Arianism, and the various confusions regarding Christ's Person. Likewise, the reformers of the 16th century clearly articulated the doctrines of soteriology and the efficacy of Christ's mediation, over and against the semi-Pelagianism and sacerdotal hierarchy of Rome. In this, the reformers unearthed Augustine's doctrines of grace, as obscured in the scholastics. And in their radical, Christocentric iconoclasm, they cleared the cluttered halls of the church, and reset the evangelical trajectory, in which the word of God (and the gospel in particular) is properly located at the center of the church's life and mission.

Yet, the reformers never worked out a consistently evangelical ecclesiology. Despite their profound grasp of the fundamentals (e.g., the recovery of the priesthood of all believers, and the clarion call of sola Scriptura), there is still, it seems to me, a deep confusion evident in Luther, in the Anglican synthesis, and even in Calvin's "Geneva experiment". One example of such confusion, I would argue, is the reformers' continued practice of infant baptism. This is particularly clear in Zwingli's idealized nationalism, as articulated against the anabaptists' "insurrectionist" practices in Zurich: 're'-baptizing one another in their own homes! After all, the failure to 'register' one's children with the state through the baptismal rite of the Swiss Church was just unpatriotic. Calvin advanced Zwingli's paedo-baptistic arguments with a more developed, covenantal theology; yet the conflation of church and state persisted in his identifying 'familial solidarity' with "covenant community" - our corporate solidarity with Christ through faith. At root, there was a failture to disentangle the church, as a spiritual entity, from the geo-political entities of Europe. Perhaps this was just too inconceivable for the "magesterial reformers," who, unlike the poor anabaptists, found themselves on the right end of Christendom's sword (at least within their respective territories).

Yet, in the case of the "American experiment," an essentially anabaptist ecclesiology won the day, and the first amendment has enshrined this political and ecclesiological distinction ever since. Was the American church then on the right path?

It seems not. Or at least, the path has been less than straight. In its modern American forms, evangelicalism has tended to neglect the church altogether. Our reformational theology, it would seem, could not sustain us, apart from a state church. But then again, in perhaps different ways, neither could it sustain continental Europe or Great Britian, with a state church! Rather than placing the blame at the feet of our anabaptistic and puritancial heritage, then, I think that our profound neglect of the church betrays a deeper inadequacy in our Western ecclesiology, bequethed to us all, as children of the reformation. It would be easy to blame secularism in all of this. But I am afraid that the fault lies more squarely with us.

I do think Europe's strident secularism, though similiar, is a different beast than the American version. Nevertheless, the same problem, I believe, lies at the root of both: a failure on our part to understand the relationship between the church, the Christian, and the mission of Christ.

To be continued...