Biblicism can’t get you where you want to go

Update (29 Feb 2024): I’m not going to revise what I’ve written below, but Matt rightly brought to my attention an ambiguity in the post; namely, that while I don’t accuse Matt of himself being biblicist, I strongly imply it. For the record, he’s not a biblicist! The running argument between us—a friendly one, I should add—is more about what one can reasonably expect to persuade evangelical Protestants of, given their prior commitments about Scripture, tradition, reason, and ecclesial authority. Nor, I might add, am I necessarily endorsing either the bundle of sexual ethics I lay out or the Roman procedure for affirming them. I’m intending, instead, to note a fundamental difficulty in evangelical and biblicist treatment of issues, particularly neuralgic issues related to sexual ethics, that are not addressed directly and explicitly in the Bible. I hope that still comes through. Apologies for the confusion.

*

I have a running argument with my friend Matt Anderson. My side in the argument is simple: You can’t get to Matt’s moral-theological positions via biblicism. You need more. In particular, you need three additional components.

But let me back up. Consider Catholic doctrine on sexual and procreative ethics. What Rome teaches is quite clear:

• No abortion.

• No cloning.

• No IVF.

• No artificial contraception of any kind.

• No self-abuse.

• No sexual activity whatsoever besides intercourse between one man and one woman who are married to each other, an action that (by definition, given the above) is intrinsically and necessarily open to new life.

Unless I’m mistaken, Matt affirms each of these six components of Catholic teaching, albeit on different grounds (partially shared with Rome, partially not). Further, he believes this teaching as a whole is simply and clearly biblical. It’s biblical teaching, not “Roman” or “magisterial” teaching.

I’m not going to argue with Matt about whether that’s true. What I’d like to share instead is an anecdote. Here it is:

I have never once, in my entire life, met a single person who believes (much less practices) the foregoing six propositions except (a) Roman Catholic Christians, (b) Christians with a theological graduate degree, and/or (c) Christian writers who cover sexual ethics and public policy.

In the case of (b) and (c), it’s worth adding that such persons, who are occasionally Protestant or Orthodox, have always and without exception been exposed in a direct and sustained manner to historic Roman magisterial teaching on sexual ethics.

What this tells me is that arriving at Catholic doctrine on these matters via “the Bible alone” may not be literally impossible (I suppose someone, somewhere, may have done it) but that it is, at the lived level of biblicist evangelical Christianity, so unlikely as to be impossible in practice.

What, then, is missing in biblicist attempts to arrive at these teachings? Three things.

First, a high view of the potential and power of natural human reason, however fallen, to draw accurate moral conclusions from the nature of created human existence regarding the essential character and divinely willed purposes of sexual activity.

Second, a living and authoritative sacred tradition developed and maintained in and by the church for the sake of instructing the faithful on new and pressing challenges to following Christ, including challenges unaddressed directly by the letter of Holy Scripture.

Third, a living and authoritative teaching office, or magisterium, governed and guided by the Holy Spirit and vested by him with the power to address, in real time, pressing challenges faced by the faithful in their daily commitment to following Christ.

It seems to me that all three are necessary and that together they are sufficient, alongside and in service to the supreme divine authority of Scripture, to do what needs doing in the moral life of the church. To do, that is, what Matt and other Protestant ethicists want to be done and see needs doing.

I should add why I believe the first two elements—which, one might argue, are found in certain Protestant communions, whether Anglican or Reformed or Wesleyan—are inadequate without the third. The reason is this. Biblicist Christians will never agree, for example, that the Bible forbids contraception, for the simple reason that there is no chapter or verse that clearly and explicitly does so. But even if some Christians were to argue that both tradition and reason likewise prohibit contraception, it remains the case that, in the absence of an ecclesial office with the authority to teach the faithful, other Christians would argue in turn (and in good faith) that their reading of Scripture, tradition, and reason differs in this respect, and that no church law, however venerable, has the power to bind their conscience on a disputed matter such as this one.

In short, Roman teaching requires Roman polity; catholic doctrine depends on and is inseparable from catholic tradition. It’s a feature, not a bug. You can’t get there otherwise, at least not in a definitive way, and not in a way that could ever command assent from other Protestants, evangelicals, or biblicists.

Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

Church on Christmas Day

Allow me to stick up for the normies.

All my people—church folk, academics, readerly believers—are worked up about (the always excellent) Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece from two days ago about Christmas Day falling on a Sunday. And rightly so: it should be a no-brainer for Christians that Christmas Day is a day to go to church. A day to worship God. A day to gather with sisters and brothers in Christ to worship the child Christ. A day about him, not a day about us. The reason for the season, you might say.

No one is wrong about this. But there’s a touch of mercilessness in the proceedings, underwritten by a lack of context, which both ups the ante and elides understanding. So let me give a cheer and a half for staying home on Christmas, or at least for grasping, in something other than shock and disbelief, why it is so many devout believers do so.

First, we aren’t talking about catholic Christians. We’re talking about Protestants.

Second, we aren’t talking about Protestants in general. We’re talking about low-church, evangelical, biblicist, frontier-revival, and/or non-denominational American Protestants.

Third, for two centuries or more this specific subgroup of American Christians—I like to call them “baptists,” the lower-case “b” coming from James McClendon—have studiously avoided any and all connection to sacred tradition, particularly the liturgical calendar. In the Stone-Campbell movement, for example, most churches would studiously avoid mentioning even the existence of either Christmas or Easter, especially (as it always does in the case of the latter) when it fell on a Sunday. In other words, what you’ve got with American baptists is a wholesale lack of a Christian calendar governing, guiding, or forming their theological, liturgical, and festal imaginations—much less their family practices.

Fourth, and simultaneously, the practice of Christmas as a cultural event has been wholly subsumed by the wider society. Advent simply doesn’t exist; Christmas—all six to eight weeks of it—does. Asking baptist Christians to go to church on Christmas Day strikes many of them like asking them to go to church on Thanksgiving. Is this historically parochial? Yes. Is it liturgically lamentable? Yes. Is it a sad reflection of the total secularization of Christmas as a national holiday? Yes. Should this occasion anger and bewilderment at the millions of laypeople who have been successfully formed by both their churches and their culture to understand and celebrate Christmas in just this way? I don’t see why. The problem is the catechesis, not the catechumens. To overstate the matter, it’s an odd instance of blaming the victim, seasoned with overripe overreaction.

Fifth and finally, in a mitigating factor, most baptist churches of which I am aware have, over the last few decades, added or expanded a major liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth, in imitation of their more liturgically catholic neighbors: a Christmas Eve service. This has come to function, albeit accidentally I’m sure, as something akin to an Easter Vigil. It isn’t the prelude to the feast on the following day. It is the feast, or rather its beginning. Just as the sun sets, God’s people gather in darkness and candlelight to mark the moment when God came to earth in a manger. They sing and pray and celebrate and remember—prior to opening gifts or doing Santa. Only once this is complete do they disperse to their homes to begin the festivities, which continue into the following morning. And since it’s only every so often that Christmas Day is on a Sunday, it’s an odd and somewhat confusing eventuality when it does. Like Catholics who opt for Saturday 5:00pm mass, these baptists intuitively sense that they have already paid homage to the child Christ the night before. Christmas Day, even on a Sunday, becomes a kind of family Sabbath. Not necessarily (though granted, surely often in fact) to Mammon and his pomp, but to gift of multiple generations of family, grandparents and grandchildren in the same home, gratitude and feasting and toys and surprise gifts and laughter and exhaustion all giving glory to God in the domestic church of one’s household, free from work and duty and consumption and travel and the rest. You don’t do anything on such a Sabbath. You don’t go anywhere. Even, as it happens, to church.

What I’m saying is: I get it. It isn’t hard at all to understand why this default setting makes all the sense in the world to normie, mainstream, low-church American Christians. I’m not angry about it. I’m not sure you should be either. I even see the Christmas Eve service as a step in the right liturgical direction. Would I prefer for baptists, like catholics, to grasp in their bones that Christmas Day is a day for church, for worshiping Christ as Christ’s body, gathered in a single place? Yes, I would. Is it reasonable to expect that to be true at this moment, given our history and where the church is today? No, I don’t think so. To get from here to there, it seems to me, is the work of generations, a decades- or even centuries-long process of cultural, familial, liturgical, and ecclesial change. I’d like to see that change happen. I think it’s happening even now. But no shade on my neighbors.

Like I say, I get it.

Evangelical and evangelical

The estimable Timothy Crouch raises a question about my series of posts, not from the CoC side, but from the evangelical:

This intriguing paragraph from Brad East (from the coda of his series of posts on the Churches of Christ: https://bradeast.org/blog/coc-coda), in which he offers a ten-point description of “evangelicalism,” inadvertently suggests that denominations like, say, the PCA are not “evangelical.”

To my mind, this mostly just indicates that we need more language than “evangelical.”There is no use denying that there are real differences (theological *and* sociological) between Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers…

… AND there is no use denying that all five of those groups (and many more which I could name) have something important in common, that the non-Christian world — to say nothing of the liberal mainline Christian world — recognizes, dislikes, and calls “evangelical.”

I tend to use the word “evangelical” expansively, to describe whatever that common sensibility is, which (on balance) I share. But being raised Anglican and now part of a Presbyterian church (and studying historical theology), on Brad’s definition I am not an evangelical.

The intriguing paragraph in question is this:

evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

Timothy’s is a worthy rejoinder, and it calls for comment. Since I talk about evangelicalism a lot, I figured I should put down in black and white what I mean and why.

For starters: I’m neither a historian nor a sociologist. I’m a theologian commenting on sociohistorical categories and terminology. So I have far from the last word on this. But given how disputed the term is in the literature, I think it’s fair to have a “take” on the question as a non-expert.

To me, any definition of “evangelical” that is primarily theological in nature is a nonstarter. It will always include more than it’s meant to, and often exclude groups that are clearly evangelical in the way most people use the word. Rather, “evangelical” names a certain subset of American Christianity, a subculture with marked family resemblances across branching genealogies and descendants. Some of these resemblances include:

• a principled commitment to biblicism;

• a leveling or egalitarian or democratic impulse;

• an association with frontier revivalism;

• an emphasis on the proclamation of the word;

• an emphasis on the event or experience of conversion;

• an emphasis on living personal faith;

• a consistently conservative approach to law, family, and gender relations;

• a certain style of hermeneutical literalism;

• a certain kind of individualism;

• a certain entrepreneurial spirit: a flair for innovation, adaptation, and deployment of new strategies and technologies in the service of the gospel;

• a deep concern for evangelism and world missions;

• a relative lack of emphasis on structures of governance, sacramental administration, holy orders, or patristic-medieval tradition.

It is true that many, perhaps most, of these features may be found, and are historically found, in Christian communions whose polity is neither congregationalist nor dismissive of sacred tradition or historic patterns of liturgy. Here’s what I want to say about that.

On one hand, I’m wanting to use “evangelical” as a meaningful term in the present, not as it was or could be used one or two centuries ago, retrospectively. And it seems to me that, for a number of reasons, the term is better reserved today for those American churches or individual Christians who do not belong to the kinds of creedal/confessional traditions Timothy has in mind. First, because there are just so few of them left, relatively speaking. Second, because evangelicalism is such a different animal than it once was. Third, because so many of those traditions have themselves been colonized by what I’d call “the evangelical style”: diminished emphasis on denominational distinctives, increased emphasis on the musical and emotional experience of Sunday morning worship, etc., etc. Just as many Methodist churches in the south are called “Metho-Baptist,” given how similar they are to their Baptist neighbors, so confessional Protestant churches are effectively post-Protestant in America, just to the extent that they have become “properly” evangelical. This is what Bruce McCormack once called “the slow death of the Protestant churches” in North America.

On the other hand, I’m not actually persuaded that “Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers” “have something important in common” that outsiders see, a “common sensibility” evident to the naked eye. A good number of the twentysomethings I know from those groups wouldn’t recognize the others as Christian. I don’t mean they’d condemn them to hell. I mean they would be, and are, utterly alienated by them, almost as if the latter belonged to some other religion altogether. This very alienation was what prompted my first post about “CoC catholicity”: I have never found anything meaningful in common with evangelicals, in terms of spiritual sensibility or theological instincts or sacramental practice, and it took me a long time to figure out why. Furthermore, the very things that annoy and repel nonbelievers and mainline liberals about evangelicals also annoy and repel them about Catholic and Orthodox Christians. (Consider the constant confusion in elite journalism about “evangelical Christians” and pro-life activism. Catholics are constantly written out of the story by classifying them under the unsavory category of “evangelical.”)

Here’s my proposal. As a capitalized noun, “Evangelical” is used with greatest clarity when applied to the kinds of Christians, churches, and communities I’ve been describing, not Presbyterians and Anglicans. But as a lower-case adjective, “evangelical” may be employed with much wider scope, whether modifying conservative mainliners or even Catholics (as in George Weigel’s usage). This sort of distinction would recognize that, at this point in American history, “Evangelical” names a tribal identity, membership in a large and unruly family only partly defined by religious belief or practice. In that sense it is a sociological designation, not a theological one. Whereas “evangelical” as an adjective modifies the mode of any kind of Christian at all, including those who are unconnected to the frontier, undefined by biblicism, unattracted to ahistorical presentism, or otherwise governed by centralized authority, historic confessions, and sacred traditions.

Whether or not that distinction is a satisfying proposal to others, it’s how I aim to use the terms, and why.

CoC: coda

A wee postscript to the series of posts these last few weeks about the churches of Christ (a topic about which I have almost never written!), based on some conversations with friends and colleagues.

1. I trust it is clear that, when I talk about the “catholic” part of CoC DNA, I’m not suggesting that churches of Christ are, or are in any way close to being, Roman Catholic. I take the point of the analogy to be the observation of what is “like” between two entities that are very much “unlike.” The term “catholic” with a lower-case “c” is something of a technical term in my own writing and elsewhere. It denotes, not the church whose head is the bishop of Rome, but the larger phalanx of historic communions that trace their history back through the middle ages to the church fathers and apostles; whose governing structure is episcopal, that is, a succession of bishops; whose sacred tradition bears real and lasting authority; whose preeminent post-biblical authorities are the creeds and dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils; whose liturgy is sacramental and finds its consummation in the celebration of the Eucharist; etc. The communions thus referred to include not only Rome and the Eastern Orthodox but also the non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, not to mention (in my view) the global Anglican communion. It is a certain doctrinal and sacramental sensibility, a latent sense of the centrality of the church, the efficacy of her sacramental ministrations, and the vocation to universal holiness, among other things, that one finds in common between these communions and, I argue, the churches of Christ.

2. What one does not find in the latter is easily stated: a centralized hierarchy, bishops, creeds, dogmas, councils, sacred tradition, church history, saints, icons, martyrs, feast days, a formal liturgical rite, a church calendar, organs of authority beyond the local church, a formal act of canonization (just who did decide what was included in the Bible for Stone-Campbellites, I wonder?), and much more besides. In this respect churches of Christ very much resemble their evangelical cousins, governed as they are by a locally elected group of elders, centered on the exclusive authority of Scripture, with no substantive doctrinal or sacramental connection to any other church, any other time period, any other teaching apart from what any one congregation judges worthy of and demanded by the canonical texts. Lacking holy orders, lacking any authoritative tradition, CoC polity and practice are decidedly biblicist and congregationalist, thereby standing in a long line of American religious piety. This is why, though CoC-ers have always repudiated Catholics as beyond the pale, their real animus has been reserved for Baptists and other evangelicals, who are just close enough to be almost-saved, but just wrong enough to be not-saved. You argue with those you have the most in common with, after all. Hence two centuries of CoC–Baptist bickering and debate. (Hence, too, the more or less total cessation of the same in recent years.)

3. Along those lines, I neglected to mention social, cultural, or political factors in the evangelicalization of churches of Christ. I alluded to a more recent one in the third post, regarding tribal affiliation and political realignment. Another major factor is the ongoing de-Christianization of the public square and the nation as a whole. Note well: This is a descriptive claim; it is neither celebration nor lament, nor still a judgment on the quality of American culture or politics when its Christian identity was at high tide. A civilization might be Christian in the sense that (for example) the Bible suffuses its rhetoric and cultural products, its laws and policy debates, its education and self-understanding. That doesn’t tell us anything of the quality of such saturation, i.e., whether anyone, much less a majority, follows faithfully the way of Christ.

In any event, the apex of Christian confidence and ecclesial power in America was the 1960s, and since then it has suffered one long sustained decline. This is relevant to the CoC/evangelical story because the context in which American churches find themselves makes an enormous difference to how they approach both their own mission and their relationship to other Christian traditions. When (it feels like) everyone in America is a Christian, then a particular church has the luxury to say, and to mean, that every other church is wrong, and it alone is right. When (it feels like) barely anyone in America is Christian anymore, and the churches are at best hemorrhaging members, at worse under cultural and political assault, then that luxury is gone. The CoC-er is stuck in the foxhole with his Baptist brother, and obviously the latter is a fellow believer (if still in error about one or two things…); what matters now is survival, not doctrinal purity. This sort of martial rapprochement is evident in the 1994 statement in First Things by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The same dynamic on display there is evident, in microcosm, in churches of Christ beginning to trend evangelical around the same time.

4. One thing I left out in my series of posts is the liberal mainline. That term refers to what once constituted the “mainstream” Protestant establishment in America (the types who were on top in the ’60s): Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists, to list only the big guns. One hears less of them these days, outside of certain enclaves and seminaries, because their numbers have, in the last half century, decreased by the millions. They have neither the political power nor the cultural capital they exercised from the time of the Founding through the Civil Rights Movement. It was to some extent from the American mainline that the Stone-Campbell movement both arose and rebelled, in the beginning. It just so happened that, instead of looking like their Great Awakening peers, Stone-Campbellites followed their restorationist hermeneutic to prioritize different texts, generate different readings, and arrive at different conclusions as to the purpose and fundamental patterns of corporate Christian life. Which, in turn, produced what I have been calling a sort of “catholic” ecclesiology and sacramentology by comparison to typical American evangelicalism.

Be that as it may, what of the mainline today vis-à-vis churches of Christ? I’m inclined to say there is no “vis-à-vis” to speak of, with one exception. As I wrote originally, in my experience there are three types of CoC-er today:

1. Someone satisfied with the old-time, if declining, CoC style;

2. Someone happy to be/come evangelical (whether by leaving the CoC or by remaining in a CoC that is, or is in process of becoming, evangelical);

3. Someone desirous of catholic tradition, liturgy, and practice.

The third group, as I said, consists mostly of folks who’ve earned graduate degrees, especially in a theological discipline. But I inadvertently left out a fourth group, which partially overlaps with the third:

4. Someone drawn to the Protestant liberal mainline.

The force of that “drawn” comes in a few flavors. First, and most prominently, women raised in churches of Christ who, discerning a call to ministry, end up leaving their tradition of origin and serving a mainline denomination as ordained pastors. Second, seminarians and ministers who, remaining in churches of Christ, appreciate aspects of catholic tradition but, at the same time, are socially and politically progressive. Third, the churches of those selfsame ministers (and lay leaders) that, over time and through their leadership, come to resemble neither the CoC nor catholic practice but the liberal mainline instead.

I’m most intrigued by this last group, and I’m glad a colleague pointed it out. So far as I can tell, actual ministers in churches of Christ do not really encompass the “catholic” option canvassed in my earlier posts. Rather, they include (1) true-blue CoC-ers, (2) normie evangelicals, and (3) liberal mainliners. Think of these categories in practical terms: Where would a minister from each group go if his or her church did not exist? I mean: If a CoC was not there to be attended? Answer:

• Minister #1 would be, and would feel, ecclesially homeless (and thus would probably start a house church!);

• Minister #2 would (without a second’s thought) go to the nearest non-denom Bible/community church;

• Minister #3 would (without missing a beat) join the Methodists or Episcopalians down the street.

Usually, you can tell which group a minister belongs to pretty easily. And the interesting thing is, you can often tell by just looking at what his or her church looks like, because the direction in which the church is headed follows closely what the minister views as the ideal. Indeed, conflict arises precisely when the ecclesial vision of a minister or ministry staff and that of an eldership are at loggerheads. If one aspires to the liberal mainline and the other to evangelicalism—not to mention if either wants to ride or die as old-school CoC—you can imagine the fireworks that will inevitably result.

The other observation I’ll make is that ministers in the first category have not only been migrating to the second category; the very boundaries between the two have been blurring for going on two decades, and for all the reasons I outlined in the second post in this series. The upshot is that soon, even very soon, CoC ministers and the congregations they lead will by and large be evangelical in tone, sensibility, doctrine, and liturgical practice, with one or two holdover curiosities from bygone days (like weekly communion or gorgeous four-part harmony)—while, say, 10-15% rep the old line and another 5-10% are stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land, one foot placed in evangelicalism and one foot squarely in the mainline. If you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m putting my money.

5. A final word, though. If I’ve only tangentially mentioned the mainline in this series, I’ve not at all mentioned the Anabaptists. Although churches of Christ lack a genetic connection to Mennonites or Brethren, there is a real family resemblance, and for many of us—especially readers of King, McClendon, Yoder, Hauerwas, Stringfellow, Camp, and other radical types—there has always been a dream that, steering between the Scylla of evangelicalism and the Charybdis of catholicism, some segment of CoC congregations would reclaim their pacifist, primitivist patrimony and pursue a third path, Anabaptist style. Alas, it was not to be. The catholic genes were too weak, the siren songs of the evangelicals too strong. (Sirenum scopuli: the birthplace of CCM!) The truth is, even the Anabaptists have authoritative tradition. An anti-tradition tradition can maintain itself as a tradition for only so long. Eventually, a pull from without or a push from within will break the spell; and once it’s broken, there’s no means of recasting it. Tradition necessarily requires concrete, practical means of perpetuating itself in recognizable continuity across generations and geography. All the more so when, as in the case of Anabaptists, the community’s self-definition requires unanimous agreement to forsake violence in all circumstances. Given the history of congregational conflict in churches of Christ, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that they aren’t going to spontaneously become pacifist tomorrow.

In other words, the lesson reiterated in earlier posts remains true: Try as you might, you can’t change yourself from having been one particular tradition into having been a different tradition all along. You are what you are. Yet change, perhaps counterintuitively, remains a possibility. How so? Let me put it this way. It is possible to “be changed” from what one was—in this case, a sort of catholic restorationist sacramental free church—“into” evangelical because evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

And this is why, to bring matters full circle, I made clear in the third (“and final”—ha) post why so many CoC-ers welcome the evangelical transition and, just so, why that transition has been so apparently frictionless. Very few people see it as a negative thing, much less a betrayal. It just seems like being, well, Christian. And once non-denom evangelicalism becomes synonymous with being Christian, it’s the only game in town.

CoC: past, present, future

My two posts on churches of Christ—the first on CoC-past as not-evangelical-but-catholic, the second on CoC-future as no-longer-catholic-but-evangelical—were intended to be merely descriptive, but I think their overall effect was something of a downer.

On one hand, many people reached out to say how much the “catholic” piece resonated with them, giving words to something they’d never quite been able to articulate. Most of these comments were tinged with lament, however. They came from people who either (1) ended up leaving churches of Christ for catholic traditions or (2) have remained, but regret and mourn the loss of the very elements that once distinguished the CoC from evangelicalism (which elements are now receding in the rear view mirror). On the other hand, the second post seemed to pour cold water on the whole thing, framing the potentially positive way of telling the “free church catholic” Stone-Campbell story as a sort of declension narrative: i.e., a tale of a movement “falling” from its evangelical-distinct origins into evangelical-adjacent status before eventual, total evangelical absorption (or acquiescence).

It turns out there are a lot of people who love what historically made the CoC distinguishable from evangelicals, and it stirs up a lot of emotions to see that passing away.

I wanted to add a few final comments along these and other lines, based on some questions and comments I received.

1. There’s an inevitable imbalance in my presentation of the “catholicity” of churches of Christ. More than one reader argued that, while the “CoC as more catholic than evangelical” frame might be on to something at the historical-theological level, the super-majority of actual CoC-attending Christians would never dream of darkening the doorstep of a catholic church (certainly Roman, but also Eastern or Anglican). That’s true. Also true: There is no mass exodus at present from churches of Christ to catholic traditions. At first I worried I’d overstated this point, but actually, you’ll see in the original post that I carefully qualified my claim:

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

I’ve emphasized the relevant clause. It’s clear that I don’t have in view normie CoC-ers. They’re not headed in droves for Rome or Constantinople. Rather, the people I’m thinking of are CoC-ers who’ve earned graduate degrees, particularly in a theological discipline. Minimally, they no longer fit the typical CoC mold: they’re pro-creed, or pro-tradition, or pro-icons, or pro–feast days, or high-liturgical, or post-biblicist, or in love with the church fathers or medievals, or what have you. Maximally, they end up converting. (Anecdotally, the more progressive go Episcopalian and the more conservative go Roman or Orthodox.)

In any case, that should clear up, if it wasn’t clear before, the subset of folks I have in mind. Which leads to the next point.

2. My broad thesis can be stated plainly:

Those churches of Christ that still exist today are increasingly evangelical in doctrine, practice, and worship; the members of such churches, especially Millennials and Gen Z, are increasingly evangelical in both style and substance; and these trends are picking up speed with every day.

I take this as given. I’ve run it by multiple scholars of CoC history. No one has gainsaid it. Every piece of anecdotal evidence confirms it. Unless and until someone objects to it as a true description of a social phenomenon, I will assume everyone agrees to its truth, however they may feel about it.

An additional anecdotal observation: For five years I have been teaching 18-22-year olds who are, nine times out of ten, the products of Bible-belt low-church traditions. In nearly every case the CoC-ers are indistinguishable from their Baptist and non-denom peers. This is because, at root, Millennial and Gen Z Baptists and CoC-ers alike have become non-denom-ers in all but name. For this reason, likewise, the “members” of each of these categories church-hop between Baptist, CoC, and non-denom congregations (without, naturally, placing actual “membership,” which now also appears to be a thing of the past), and they see no discrepancy or oddity in their doing so. And this, finally, is because, mostly to a person, they are DIY evangelicals at heart. The name or tradition on the side of a church building (or, as they might say first, in the URL of the church website) means next to nothing; for someone who attends there, at least from these generations, such an identity is only skin deep. Beneath the skin lies the soul of non-denom evangelicalism. And it is strong; it is a force to be reckoned with.

So: The flip side of being clear (negatively) that the catholic vein of CoC-dom has nearly run dry is being clear (positively) that there is a theological sensibility winning out in churches of Christ. That sensibility is evangelical. It is found in the pews, in the pulpits, in the worship, and in the doctrines (or lack thereof) that one finds on the websites and in the elderships and classrooms of CoC congregations.

3. A friend asks: Why so certain? Even if I’m right about the trajectory, is my confidence about the future warranted?

Theoretically, I grant the point. No one knows the future. In this case, though, I think I have very good grounds for confidence. Here’s why.

First, I’m not so much predicting the future as commenting with honesty about the present. There are approximately one-seventh as many CoC-ers in America as there are Mormons. That number has been declining for a long time. Covid only sped up the process. Some churches are closing their doors; some are changing the name over the doors; some are losing their younger members, not only to unbelief, but also to the local community church; and most of those that remain are changing so as to look more like said community church. In a few pockets (Abilene, Searcy, Nashville, et al) the old-school persists, and some congregations that look like “traditional” churches of Christ continue to flourish. But even these, while retaining the trappings of the old line, are different than they once were, in subtle but significant ways. The most important difference is an overt political and cultural realignment with American evangelicalism. Which means that, for them, their evolving sensibilities may, for now, be located less in worship style or explicit doctrine than in tribal affiliation. But the latter will begin to manifest in the former sooner rather than later.

Second, there are simply no reasons I have ever encountered, in any context, to believe that any of the trends identified above is likely to cease. This is because, while it may sound like I am sounding the death knell of churches of Christ, that’s not in fact what I’m doing. So far as I can tell, most adult believers in CoC congregations today, and many of their children, will remain Christian in twenty or forty years, just as a sizable number of the congregations they inhabit will still be around. The question is not a matter of wholesale denominational disappearance or widespread apostasy. The question, instead, is: Will they—will any of them—identify as “church of Christ”? And even when they do, will such an identification entail a substantial resemblance to CoC doctrine and practice 150 years prior? Or will the resemblance be far closer to their evangelical neighbors? The question answers itself.

Third, then, while it may be the case that “trending evangelical” is something to bemoan on the part of old-timers, catholic weirdos, and Stone-Campbell eggheads, what is evident is that most ordinary CoC members, leaders, and congregations don’t see it that way. They see their evolution as both consistent with their past and desirable as their future. Such persons would, I think justifiably, roll their eyes at my reflections in these posts. They don’t see American evangelicalism as a fate worse than death. They see it as an imperfect but nonetheless healthy expression of the gospel in our context. Now, it is undeniable, at the historical, sociological, and theological level, that for churches of Christ to complete their annexation by evangelicalism would mean, in one sense, the end of churches of Christ as we have known them. But from death comes life; resurrection follows crucifixion; organic, healthy change sometimes requires painful pruning. That’s what mainstream evangelical-trending CoC-ers would say and do say. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so, and nothing in principle makes their judgment problematic. It’s only old-school and/or catholic oddballs and academics who find themselves squirming in their pews.

4. What then? After all this analysis, is there anything constructive to be said or done? Let me close by making a few gestures in this direction.

(a) Many churches of Christ are not in a good way. I know multiple consultants who receive weekly calls from congregations asking for help, and all the consultants can offer is wisdom about how to die well. This is a fact on the ground that anyone plugged into CoC networks knows full well, and it’s neither pessimistic nor alarmist to say it out loud. As I have written elsewhere, what many churches need today from their elders and pastors is nothing so much as hospice care. They’re going to die anyway. A church can die faithlessly, grieving as those without hope, or it can die faithfully, with hope in Christ our Savior. Aiding communities in doing the latter is good, sacred work. We need more ministers willing to do it and trained in the art of how to do it well. And we’re aren’t doing anyone a favor by putting our head in the sand, pretending it’s not happening.

(b) There is a fundamental misdiagnosis I have also written about elsewhere. That is, pastors and elders—always fighting the last generation’s war—suppose that what ails their churches is too much: too much doctrine, too much orthodoxy, too much firmness, too much concreteness, in short, too many answers and not enough questions. This is wrong. What bedevils churches today, and above all the under-30 crowd, is too little: too little doctrine, too little liturgy, too little substance, too little stability, too little confidence, too few answers. Young people today are begging for answers and what they’re receiving is mostly scraps and shrugs. They are drowning, and no one is throwing them a life raft. Instead, they hear a voice calling to them: “I’d try to help, but I wouldn’t want to presume!” Presume away. If the church lacks confidence in the truth of the gospel, then of all people we are most to be pitied. Preach the truth in love. That’s the answer now, as it always was and always will be, because both truth and love are synonymous with Jesus himself, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

(c) Evangelicalism is not a monolith. It includes charismatics, prosperity preachers, entertainment mega-churches (think: spotlights and smoke machines), generic DIY-ers, and confessional traditions. For CoC-ers trending evangelical, it is certainly possible to find prudent ways to avoid the first four and aim for the fifth. It’s possible, I say, but difficult. The reason is that confessional traditions belong, as the name says, to traditions defined by confessions. Those confessions may be broadly Reformed, or Anglican, or Lutheran, or Wesleyan, or other. They are embodied in books of discipline, common prayer, catechisms, institutes, seminaries, synods, and more. They characterize an entire ecclesial culture, rooted in a particular history out of which the tradition itself and its manifold churches spring forth and from which they continue to be nourished.

That’s what makes “becoming” confessional-evangelical difficult for churches of Christ. Not only would a congregation need to be led by a wise and trusted pastor. The elders would all have to be on the same page. And they, together with the pastor and the rest of the ministry staff, would have to guide and catechize the congregation such that folks in the pews—not only formed as CoC-ers but trained, as levelers, to think like egalitarian biblicists—would consent unanimously to become, or even to join, a preexisting confessional tradition. Doubtless such a process could begin incrementally, without many people realizing it. And a partial move in this direction is easy to imagine. But a comprehensive transformation? Possible in theory, I suppose, but difficult in practice.

(d) Having said that: You’d be surprised, if you know anything about churches of Christ, what you’re liable to find in some of them today. I know one that recites the Apostles’ Creed. I know another that practices corporate confession and absolution of sin in weekly public worship. I know another that says the Lord’s Prayer. Others process to the front to receive communion; still others locate communion at the climax of the liturgy, following the sermon. Many have begun following the church calendar and/or preaching according to the lectionary (goodbye, sermon series!). Taken together, these are rather radical changes to two centuries’ worth of habits; these habits amounted to a default setting for Sunday morning once assumed to be an immutable blueprint. So perhaps I am overestimating the potential resistance to change and underestimating the hunger for sacred tradition and historic liturgical patterns.

(e) The challenge that remains is this. If part of the underlying problem is DIY-ness, how does a congregation opt, with radical autonomy, to submit to an authority beyond itself? How, in a word, can a church use its autonomy to undo its autonomy? And with lasting effects? No one wants to make a change today that’ll probably by reversed tomorrow. Nothing could be more enervating for the task of reform.

In this case, I have little to offer. It feels like an intractable problem. But perhaps it is not. Here, as always, we are reduced to prayer, specifically to invocation of the Spirit. The church is dead apart from the life the coming of the Spirit brings. What we must do, then, besides our analysis and our planning and our working, is beg the Spirit to come to our aid.

So we cry: Veni sancte Spiritus!

And it’s a sweet irony, ending there, if you recall the role of the Spirit in Stone-Campbell teaching. Having once shrunk him down to size—to the size of the Bible on the lectern, in fact—we now plead for his sovereign presence once more. Mortification and vivification: that is what we need. To be slain by his fiery power and raised by his might to the only life worth having; his life, which is the unquenchable life of Christ.

Reunion

Reading theology from the previous century has the power to trick you into thinking that reunion between the divided communions was, and remains, a live possibility. As late as 1999, when Robert Jenson published the second volume of his systematic theology, the bulk of which is a fulsome ecclesiology in close conversation with both Vatican II and the most recent ecumenical dialogues, you would be forgiven for getting the impression that reunion—between Rome and Wittenburg, between Rome and Canterbury, even between Rome and Constantinople—was conceivable within our lifetime, even right over the horizon.

More generally, reading about church division and the need for church unity on the page can make the matter seem rather simple, certainly from a low-church or Protestant perspective. It inevitably reduces the problem to disagreements over theology; accordingly, once those disagreements are resolved, unity becomes achievable.

To my readerly mind, it made the most sense that, if any communions were to reunite in our lifetime, it would be Rome and the East. After all, on the page, very little in terms of substantive theological disagreements obtain between them. (I can defend that claim another time!) On the page, Rome is willing to meet the East halfway—and then some. On the page, these things can be worked out. The unity of God’s people is at stake, after all! The very truth of Jesus’s prayer for his church in John 17!

On the page, all of this seems eminently plausible. Until, that is, you meet an actual, flesh-and-blood Orthodox Christian. Until you read an actual Orthodox writer who is neither American nor trained in American institutions. Until you visit an actual Orthodox country. Until you attend the Divine Liturgy or visit an Orthodox monastery.

And then it hits you. This is a pipe dream. Reunion between Rome and the East will never happen. Not ever. Not until the Lord’s return. Rome could meet the East 99% of the way, and the East would look at that 1% and say: Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good.

Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic. Or perhaps it sounds like I’m indicting the East or endorsing the West. That’s not at all what I mean, though. As David Bentley Hart wrote a few years back, Eastern Orthodoxy has always been skeptical of the ecumenical movement, for at least two reasons intrinsic to and coherent with its own teachings and history. The first is that ecumenism waters down the faith to a few core beliefs beyond which all else, especially liturgical form and sacred tradition, is adiaphora. In other words, ecumenism Protestantizes the faith. But if you think that Protestantism is wrong about the faith, why would you do that? The second reason is that the East does not believe the church is divided, or that it lacks the fullness of Christ’s promise to his one church. It does not believe, as Rome does, that it suffers a “wound.” Rather, the East believes wholeheartedly and without apology that it is and forever shall be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church that Christ founded by his Spirit on Pentecost some two thousand years ago. It has kept the faith whole and entire; it has preserved the faith once for all delivered to the saints; it has not wavered; it has not broken; it has not failed. It cheerfully welcomes all, including schismatics and heretics (i.e., Romans and Protestants), to join its ranks. But it is unbroken, undivided, and complete. Ecumenism, on this view, is at once an affront, a contradiction, a threat, and a solvent to this crucial truth. To admit it, to engage it, to accept it, would be to deny the fact of Orthodoxy itself.

So, as I say, I’m not writing in critique of the East. I’m writing with a bird’s-eye view on the total matter of church unity, in global perspective. And after a century of optimism, things don’t look good. Despair is a sin, so we aren’t allowed that route. But it is hard to see, for me it is impossible to see, what it might mean to hope and work for the unity of the church across both the world and millennia-long divisions. For those divisions have become cultural, deeply ingrained in the folkways and forms of life that define distinct peoples, such as Greece or Russia. What would, what could, reunion mean for such people on the ground (and not on the page)? I have no answer.

Jenson, following Ratzinger, notes at the beginning of volume one of his systematics that theologians under conditions of ecclesial division can only write for the one church that God will, by his grace, someday bring about. He says further that such unity must be a work of the Spirit—and the Spirit may act tomorrow. I believe these words. I follow that vision. But I worry, sometimes, that they are merely marks on a page. For the letter kills; the Spirit gives life.

In a word, in the matter of our impossible division, we are reduced to prayer. So I pray:

How long, O Lord? How long will your people be separated one from another? Come, Spirit, come! Restore your people. Make them one as you are one. Hear our prayer, and hear your Son’s, on our behalf, and for his sake: Amen.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.