LOCATING THE UNITY OF CHRIST’S RULE: A RESPONSE TO RESPONDENTS TO BAPTIST IDENTITY AND THE ECUMENICAL FUTURE

Iâ€™m pleased that my respondents havenâ€™t shrunk from challenging me. Theyâ€™ve embodied well the contestation of what it means to...

1 The image, which may be viewed online at https://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/4069-5167 is from a mid-eighteenth-century icon calendar for the month of October by the Novgorod School of Russian Orthodox iconographers. 2 For the final front cover image on the dust jacket of Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future, see the book's page on the Baylor University Press site at http://www.baylorpress.com/Book/470/Baptist_Identity_and_the_Ecumenical_Future.html. 3 Symeon Axenti's 1513 wall fresco of the Council of Ephesus in the Church of St. Sozomenos in Galata, Cyprus may be viewed online at http://www.katapi.org.uk/ChristianFaith/StSozomenos.htm; the image posted online is credited to Henry Chadwick and Gillian Rosemary Evans, eds., Atlas of the Christian Church (London: Macmillan, 1987). emperor Theodosius II wasn't actually present at the council but is prominently portrayed in the centre of the fresco, between the two factions, as the council's presiding authority. There's the silencing of the voices of theological dissent, represented by Macedonius and Nestorius, anathematized as heretics in absentia and depicted as cowering beneath the feet of the council fathers. And then there's the context of the painter and the church for which the fresco was painted in 1513-Orthodox, almost five centuries after 1054 Great Schism and on the eve of the further divisions of the church in the sixteenth century (the fresco dates to 1513). This is not the church fully under the rule of Christ; thus the book's summons to ecumenical pilgrimage.
Andrew Smith wonders if the cooperative impetus for Baptist denominational structures has a place in my ecumenical rationale for their continuation (offered in chapter six, "The End of Baptist Denominationalism"). Yes-in light of the coinherence of ecumenism and mission, 4 and to the degree that such intra-denominational cooperation takes seriously the "Lund Principle" voiced at the Third World Conference on Faith and Order in 1953: "the churches should act together in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately." 5 In other words, what the churches can do together, they should do together. Denominational structures can be the means by which interdenominational cooperation can be coordinated. In that connection the Baptist impetus for translocal denominational structures would indeed join the way in which translocal denominational structures serve as the bearers of the traditions that facilitate receptive ecumenical learning as that which legitimates the continued separate ecclesial existence of Baptist denominational identity-for the time being.
He asks also about what seems to be my lack of distinction between description and prescription. I grant that we theologians don't always signpost that move, but I should hasten to add that historians too narrate the Christian past in subtly prescriptive ways-and I don't think that's a bad thing for either of us to do. The example Smith offers is what I would call "prescriptive re-description," a complexifying of the received description that raises questions about its prescriptive adequacy and suggests the possibility of a differently nuanced prescription. I note three things about this example. First, what he quotes continues, 4 The coinherence of unity and mission, evident in the roots of the modern ecumenical movement in the modern missions movement, has been re-emphasized in recent ecumenical theology. If one compares World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper no. 111;Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), with World Council of Churches, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Faith and Order Paper no. 214; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013), one feature of The Church: Towards a Common Vision that seems most obviously an advance beyond BEM is the way it reengages the roots of the modern ecumenical movement in the modern missions movement. The Church: Towards a Common Vision frames the quest for Christian unity as a participation in God's mission in the world in its opening chapter, titled "God's Mission and the Unity of the Church." The opening paragraph ends with these two sentences: "The Church, as the body of Christ, acts by the power of the Holy Spirit to continue his lifegiving mission in prophetic and compassionate ministry and so participates in God's work of healing a broken world" [emphasis added] ( § 1 [p. 5]). This first chapter sees the missio dei, "God's plan to save the world," as carried out in the sending of the Son, defined by the earthly ministry of Jesus, extended in the church as the body of Christ that continues his mission, and empowered by the Holy Spirit sent upon the church and into the world ( § 3 [p. 6]). In the next chapter on "The Church of the Triune God," the church "is by its very nature missionary, called and sent to witness in its own life to that communion which God intends for all humanity and for all creation in the kingdom" [ § 13 (p. 10)]. 5 World Council of Churches, The Third World Conference on Faith andOrder, Lund 1952, ed. Oliver S. Tomkins (London: SCM Press, 1953), 15-16.
"even while they affirm and encourage the individual reading of Scripture." 6 Second, this isn't a description of Baptists in their distinctiveness, but rather my articulation of a basic consensus between Baptists and Catholics that's also significantly differentiated in the remainder of the paragraph. Third, the "Baptist Manifesto" 7 and Philip Thompson's dissertation 8 are footnoted there not as sources that substantiate bare description, but as examples of this differently nuanced way of reading the early Baptist insistence that the Bible be read for oneself in light of the early Baptist insistence that those who read the Bible for themselves should read it as a community that confers regularly upon its sense. 9 Thompson calls attention to Thomas Helwys' critique of a kind of individual interpretation practised by Anglican bishops, who interpreted Scripture arbitrarily and coercively apart from the community of the faithful. 10 Is there room in my proposal for Baptists who still think we have it right on some issues like baptism?
Yes-I'm one of those. But as I noted with regard to baptism, there's a sense in which the ecumenical movement, and even the Catholic Church within it, has converged toward our position; yet we can continue to offer believers' baptism as a gift to the whole church while recognizing parallel essentials in the differently ordered "journey of Christian beginnings" that starts with infant baptism. 11 Should Baptists who don't fit my ecumenical re-description of Baptist identity be written off as not : we begin with a prayer, [and] after reading some one or two chapters of the Bible give the sense thereof, and confer upon the same; that done we lay aside our books, and after a solemn prayer [is] made by the speaker, he propounds some text out of the Scripture, and prophecies out of the same, by the space of one hour, or three-quarters of an hour" [spelling and punctuation modernized]. 10 Here is the quotation in question: "It was . . . primarily in the community that Baptists believed that Scripture bore the Word of God. In earliest Baptist worship, after the Scripture was read, the whole congregation conferred upon the sense of the passage prior to any of the day's four or five expositions. Interpretation of Scripture which was private and dissociated from the community was frowned upon by the Baptists.
[Thomas] Helwys excoriated the Church of England for limiting the acceptable interpreters of Holy Writ to the bishops, for such private interpretation kept the Spirit in bondage and made the Word to no effect" (Philip E. Courtney Pace presses me on the adequacy of religious orders as an analogy for the place of denominational traditions in a united church of the future. All analogies break down at some point, and this one breaks down at several points in the historical development of the relationship of these orders with the institutional church (though the contrast between early monastic communities and "institutional" church is often overdrawn). But in monasticism are antecedents of something like a believer's church community, whose members are covenanting to bring their life together more fully under the rule of Christ. Others have envisioned an ecumenical future in which denominational traditions function as distinctive religious orders within a united church; for example, the earliest round of the Methodist-Catholic international dialogue creatively re-imagined John Wesley as the founder of a religious order within the one church. 14 I didn't address gender and race as explicit motifs, but I differ with Pace's characterization of their place in the book. The point of the paragraph in which I mention several theologies rooted in experience and social location wasn't to marginalize these voices, but precisely the opposite: to include them squarely within this configuration of free church magisterium as voices that must be heard and weighed and not silenced-they are not marginalized, but "magisterialized" in my treatment of them. 15  As a corrective Metropolitan Coorilos outlined a contextual Christology in which the solidarity of the incarnation is with the Dalit, the untouchable caste, with profound implications for what it means for the church to be the body of this Christ. The Commission heard that voice, and it is discernable in the final text of the document. These theological voices are attentive to gender and race, to experience and social location, as integral to the quest for unity, and they're my primary dialogue partners-even if my focus on the Faith and Order stream of the ecumenical movement rather than its Life and Work stream, where the ecumenical quest for racial and gender justice has tended to be focused at the international level (and which I also affirm as indispensable for the church's pilgrimage to the ecumenical future), has meant that I've not highlighted these themes in this book in ways that correspond to their importance. The subject of the book is the whole church, and not only Western men-but Pace is right to remind us that the divisions we must overcome to get to the ecumenical future are not only between denominations. She's also right to insist that the maintenance of ecumenical relationships not be prioritized over the prophetic call for just relationships, for ecumenism ought to entail speaking truth in love. The WCC Programme to Combat Racism did this: it spoke truth to a member church, the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, at great institutional cost to the WCC. But the outcome was repentance and reconciliation, and today the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa is once again a member church of the WCC that it . 20 Yet I do not intend that language to suggest that Catholics have a corner on catholicity, nor for that matter do I intend the occasional use of "ecclesial communities" with reference to Baptist churches to suggest that I think their status is less than fully church. (It should be noted that Catholic documents referring to the "ecclesial communities" of the Protestant Reformation as distinguished from what constitutes a "church" in the proper sense in Catholic understanding-i.e., the Orthodox churches-is at least affirming their ecclesiality, for the application of "ecclesial" to them means that they are regarded as partaking of important qualities of what it means to be church in Catholic understanding, but elaboration of the implications of noting this is beyond the scope of this response.) I appreciate Wilhite's call for clarification regarding the nature of ecclesial "separation" and "visible unity." I envision visible unity not as structural merger but in terms of the WCC "New Delhi" definition, according to which unity is visibly happening if "all in each place" at the grassroots are mutually engaging in baptismal recognition, Eucharistic hospitality, confession and recognition in one another of the essence of the apostolic faith, recognition of members and ordained ministers, mission and service and work for the liberation of the oppressed, and prophetic engagement when occasion requires. 21 To the degree that we are unable to do any of these things with full mutuality, separation is happening.  Churches, 1961(New York: Association Press, 1962: "We believe that the unity which is both God's will and his gift to his Church is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Savior are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully-committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith, preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate I applaud Amy Chilton Thompson's call to extend my emphases on receptive ecumenism and "the story of all the members of Christ's body" as essential to the church's identity in the direction of a more intentional exchange of the gifts of individual faith stories dispersed throughout our churches. She connects this with one of the theses of the McClendon-inspired narrative-christological ecclesiology I outline in chapter nine, but that is not the only location of my suggestion that these gifts be offered and received in the practice of receptive ecumenism. In chapter seven, lived Christian lives were the final example I offered of the voices that should be heard and weighed without being silenced in the congregational practice of "Free Church magisterium." 22 Chilton Thompson rightly relates the embrace of these lived embodiments of the Christian narrative to what I framed much earlier in the book as the Baptist gift of the "insistence that God's freedom to be God in the life of the church not be constrained." The McClendon quote that ends the section on the magisterial function of lived Christian lives makes such a connection: "If we remember, and relive, and so tell the stories that great Christians are discovered among us again in our own day, then the saints are alive and the Spirit again informs the people of God." 23 How can these stories be incorporated more intentionally into the fabric of Baptist congregational life? In my earlier book Towards Baptist Catholicity I suggested that these formative stories of lived Christian lives become a primary means of illustration in preaching; 24 I would add to this suggestion Christian education in its various forms and settings as another congregational locus for this reception.
In conclusion: Jürgen Moltmann served as a member of the WCC Faith and Order Commission for two decades, from 1963 until 1983. In his autobiography he lamented that the paradigm of "unity in reconciled difference" that emerged during the 1970s had become "the sleeping pill of the ecumenical movement," so that "we all stay as we are and are nice to each other." 25 I do think we should be nice to each other, but I don't think we can insist that the precondition of Baptist participation in the ecumenical movement be a guarantee that Baptists may stay as we are. Baptist identity is not an end in itself, but a means toward the end of the church fully under the rule of Christ, with unity as one of the marks of that rule. But Christian unity is also not an end in itself; it's a means toward the end of God's intentions for the world.
God's goal for the world is community. The church's recovery of community is a means toward that ultimate goal. The Church: Towards a Common Vision puts it this way: "Communion, whose source is the very life of the Holy Trinity, is both the gift by which the Church lives and, at the same time, the gift that God calls the life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages, in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people.