A New Beginning

I have not posted in quite a while. This will be a long one...

There comes a point in time when one has to face reality. I decided, after 25 years or so of discomfort, that I needed to graciously bow out of the world of independent evangelicalism and try to find a connection to the early church. For many of my friends, this decision seems confusing, to a few it may seem outright heretical. But there are reasons that are practical and not just theological or personal.

If one accepts the premise (which all Protestants and most Catholics do) that there was corruption in the Roman church leading up to the Reformation, then one should accept that there were at least valid reasons for protest. (Whether a division of the western church was necessary is another matter.) I have come to understand that the protest which was intended to call the church back to the center instead led to a tug of war with Rome pulling one way and the Reformers pulling the other. Unfortunately, the rope broke. As a result, it appears that the Roman church continued on a path that was veering off to one side on certain issues, but the protestant churches, at the breaking of the rope, fell away to the other side, veering away from the center in the other direction.

Luther and the reformers objected to indulgences, transubstantiation and abuse of papal power. But Luther ended up rejecting the book of James. Calvin agreed with Luther about Rome, but ended up denying (to some degree) human free will. Zwingli rejected the sacraments and largely redefined worship. And so a steady devolution began. Eventually, a generation ago, mainline protestant bishops would reject the virgin birth and the resurrection, while fundamentalist church leaders would withdraw into separatist movements and attempt to reconstruct a "first-century" faith beginning only from the New Testament and human reason.

As a result, for most evangelicals in independent churches, there is little or no knowledge of, much less connection to, church history. We have moved away from the perceived abuses of Rome, but have wound up teetering on the edge of our very foundation. For all most evangelicals know, at least those I have associated with for 25 years, the true church ceased to exist in the middle of the second century and was somehow revived by Luther. It was then necessary, in the eyes of some, to "correct" even Luther's view of infant baptism and the eucharist. Most evangelicals remain convinced that the particular movement they are associated with is truer and more "biblical" than virtually every other movement in all of church history. And we don't seem to find that presumptious in the least.

Today, independent evangelicals follow a particular pattern, a mode of operation. Armed primarily with the Bible and a with sermons and commentaries from a limited number of like-minded evangelical figures from the last 100 to 400 years, we have tried to respond to the rapid changes in culture, trying to anticipate where it is going, usually reacting too late, and reinventing the church accordingly.

In the evangelicalism I first knew in the early seventies, we sought to convince people intellectually of the truth of scripture, or our understanding of it, with argumentation, debate, reasoned apologetics. We tried to draw people to faith by borrowing musical forms from the culture at large and pasting salvation messages into the lyrics. Church services gradually focused more and more on preaching that tried to engage the issues of the day and music that sounded like top 40 radio.

Then the 80s came, and new age thinking overtook the culture. We responded with an approach that focused on a more subjective sense of the spiritual. Reasoned apologetics gave way to experiential encounters with a more contemporary God. The 90s came and the megachurch came with it. Nothing in the church existed that could not be analyzed, quantified, systemized, and evangelism became a marketing campaign. Worship became a therapeutic self-help seminar.

Oddly, though we couldn't see why, the culture at large was for the most part unaffected by all our activities, stategies, passion and zeal. Divorce rates within the church rose to frightening levels, church kids were sexually active, understanding of real theology became more and more shallow.

Little by little it dawned on me - we evangelicals never denied the essentials of the faith explicitly, we just let them drift away while we were busy trying to reinvent virtually every aspect of Christianity. We devised new strategies for evangelism, created new music for the seeker, invented new patterns of worship, reorganized our governing structures, forged new alliances with human service organizations, developed new ways of interpreting scripture, even rethought doctrines about God and Christ and salvation and the church itself. But at some point, if everything is re-invented, it ceases to be what it once was. At some point there is nothing left.

One cannot have a stable Christianity if one loses sight of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's prayer, the apostles' creed, as if such things are outdated and below our enlightened sensibilities or too stale for the latest growth strategy. One cannot have a stable Christianity if churches are governed only by a loose agreement between pastors and lay people not to devour each other, as if submission to structure of spiritual authority is a corruption of the New Testament and early church practice. One cannot have a vital and compelling Christianity if scripture can be "interpreted" subjectively according to the needs of the individual or "deconstructed" to be relevant to the latest trend, as if no one had ever studied the Bible before Marin Luther. While we as evangelicals have sought to defend the "fundamentals" at times, the list of what is fundamental and non-negotiable keeps shrinking and getting redefined with each successive generation and each new movement.

So I have had to move back to the center. Though I agree with the Reformers that the Bible is the final authority and above all others, I no longer believe it is the only authority or can be read without respect for 2000 years of church history and interpretation. Even though I believe, with the Reformers, that transubstantiation is an overwrought and confusing explanation of the Lord's Supper, I cannot ignore that the church of at least 1600 years of history considered the Lord's Supper to be vital and the culmination of worship, uniting believers with Christ and each other. Even though I cannot accept a notion that a church hierarchy is infallible and has absolute authority to interpret scripture and seemingly define new doctrines that are difficult to find in the early church, I cannot ignore that the church has been organized from the earliest records with bishops being charged and consecrated for the task of preserving apostolic teaching and maintaining order in the churches.

For over thirty years I have sought only to understand the truth of the the Christian faith and to be obedient to it. If I am to be faithful to the truth of the faith, I cannot ignore what I have recently come to understand. I remain Protestant, in that I think there were things in the medieval Roman church worthy of protest. I remain orthodox, in that I wish to affirm core truths that have been held, as Vincent of Lerins put it, "always, everywhere and by all". I desire to be catholic, with a small "c", in that I desire an eventual end to denominationalism and a unity around what C.S. Lewis termed "Mere Christianity". But to be an orthodox, catholic, protestant, I needed to change and come back to some essentials most evangelicals have forgotten.

So from this point forward, I am on a new path through old territory. And this blog will be an attempt to document some of my thoughts over time and allow for dialog. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back to the center. Personally, I have to hope so.