The Journal of Christian Studies just published their issue on Catechesis, the process by which Christians are taught how to be Christian. I wrote an article for that issue, which I teased on this blog a couple months back, and now that the article is out, I want to continue to wrestle with some of the ideas I bring up in it. Before I get into it, though, I want to encourage readers to purchase the issue or subscribe to the journal, not only because there are some great articles in this most recent issue but also because subscriptions help support what I take to be a top-tier journal and a real blessing to the Church.
Even though I’m still reading through the issue, judging from the titles of the other articles, I’m confident I’ve staked out a controversial position in my essay. Yet to really appreciate my position and why it’s perhaps controversial, I first need to offer some context.
The Churches of Christ, like many evangelical Protestants (but even more so), have deliberately cut ourselves off from the history of the Church. There are, of course, mixed reviews on whether that was a good or bad thing, but for my current purposes, let me highlight some of the negative consequences of ignoring everything after the first century:
- Our lack of interpretive conventions or an agreed upon core for reading the Bible has opened us up to fringe interpretations and continued division.
- This can be seen from the very beginning as a lack of controls on how to read the Bible allowed figures as preeminent as Barton Stone to misunderstand the Trinity along the lines of something like Arian heresy. (I take this fact to weigh most heavily among theologians who see that potential for error baked into the tradition’s DNA.)
- In a more modern setting, ministers are forced to reinvent the wheel when it comes to age-old theological questions, and they may naturally feel unequipped to do so.
- A lack of historical rootedness contributes to ongoing attrition, particularly among younger generations who, feeling a sense of historical homelessness, often find the tradition too thin to sustain them through complex spiritual or intellectual crises.
In short, we shoot ourselves in the foot when we ignore the early Church’s guidance for how to read Scripture or live the Christian life.
Enter, then, the Great Tradition. Recent decades have seen a surge of Protestants interested in naming the core of Christian faith that has persisted from the Apostles to the present and in rejoining that great stream. In Churches of Christ, this retrieval has roots both internal—our own historical primitivism, the scholarship of Everett Ferguson and other academically trained theologians—and external—the influence of ressourcement and retrieval theology, the paleo-orthodoxy of Thomas Oden, the Yale school and Stanley Hauerwas, to name a few. Today, this impulse appears especially in the work of figures like C. Leonard Allen, John Mark Hicks, Brad East, and the theologians associated with Canonical Theism (including my own mentor, Mark Powell). While their proposals differ, they share a conviction that Churches of Christ would benefit from studying the patristics and medievals and in recovering the resources from which we have largely cut ourselves off: Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, the Apostles’ Creed and Rule of Faith, and a more deliberate liturgical life marked by creedal language, sacramental understandings of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, ritual, mystery, and communal identity.
Whether or not those names or terms mean much to you, the benefit of the Great Tradition, or the upshot of all this, is (1) standards, like the Apostles’ Creed and the Rule of Faith, by which to judge readings of Scripture; (2) reminders of the doctrines (e.g., the Trinity) and practices (e.g., baptism and the Lord’s Supper) that matter most; (3) a rich inheritance of theological reflection that provides resources for answering questions the Church has been asking for centuries; and (4) an increased sense of ecumenicism, by focusing on the core we share with other Christian traditions and the vast history of the Church.
That all sounds good to me—which is probably to be expected since an appreciation for the Great Tradition has been a consistent part of my own theological education. From my undergrad coursework to my PhD classes, either through emphasis on the patristics or Canonical Theism or liturgy, I have been very much shaped to appreciate Christian thought after the New Testament. Yet it wasn’t until I attended the Christian Scholars Conference for the first time, several years ago, that I began to notice the trend across Restorationist theology to emphasize the Great Tradition and to identify it as the solution to the points above. After a few years of attending the conference, hearing the same appeals to the Apostles’ Creed and the Rule of Faith, I began to grow skeptical. Undoubtedly, part of that skepticism is because I’m a contrarian by nature, but I also had some real questions.
Let me step through a few of those.
Perhaps my most minor concern—that is, the one I’m most happy to accept that I’m wrong and move on—is whether we’re putting too much emphasis on the Trinity? Hear me out. I’ve got my trinitarian bonafides; there are countless witnesses over many years who can testify to me arguing that no doctrine is as central and important as the Trinity. And yet, to lean on a theological cliche, isn’t it noteworthy that we don’t even get that term in the Bible? Or, more to the point, isn’t noteworthy that the doctrine is never explicitly laid out in Scripture? Of course I think the Trinity is important, and of course I think it is important to avoid the heresies that dominated the early Church’s attention, and of course I think the Trinity is the bedrock for so much beautiful Christian theology—but, to insist that lay Christians have anything like a sophisticated (or even entirely orthodox) conception of the doctrine is unbiblical, unhistorical, and, frankly, silly. Most Christians get along just fine by the mere recognition that God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit.
I also wonder, are we expositors of the Great Tradition expecting too much from the Apostles’ Creed and Rule of Faith? To begin with, my capitalizing “Rule of Faith” is part of the problem; it overstates that the rule is. The rule of faith is not a formal rule like the Greatest Commandment or Kant’s Categorical Imperative or 12 Rules for Life—it’s a rule of thumb, an understood rule for how to read Scripture that relies on (and this is important) a variety of things, generally including trinitarian theology and the nature and work of Christ. But more to my point, the idea that using the Apostles’ Creed and rule of faith for filtering readings of Scripture ignores all of our insights regarding interpretation from the 20th century: namely, that you can argue for any interpretation and even argue that it fits the Apostles’ Creed. Furthermore, I’m not convinced that the Apostles’ Creed has a very impressive track record for preventing heresy. On one side, almost all of the great heresies and splits have come out of traditions that recite the Creed; on the other side, the Churches of Christ seem to have a perfectly decent track record (all things considered) without citing the Creed. Never once have I heard a COCer suggest, “Maybe Jesus didn’t suffer under Pontius Pilate or rise from the dead”—but I have heard a couple Anglicans consider as much.
A final question: who is this emphasis on ancient liturgy for? If a part of swimming in the Great Tradition is reciting the Nicene Creed or saying “Thanks be to God” after Bible readings, I have to wonder, what group are we envisioning doing this? Surely not a Church of Christ? I mean, I like it and get some benefit out of it, but the idea of implementing it in my local congregation seems totally alien. In fact, it seems like the entire idea would be to create a congregational life for academics and intellectuals—and Heaven knows that no one should be subjecting to a congregation of purely academics and intellectuals.
I trust this is enough background on both the Great Tradition retrieval and my skepticism of it. My article is specifically an argument that, as great as the Great Tradition is (and I mean that sincerely), it is not a silver bullet for the formation and indoctrination of Christians. It needs to play some part in that process, but catechesis most fully takes place in the ordinary practice of the local church—in reading Scripture at a Wednesday night service, in coordinating volunteers for the nursery, in serving communion, in chatting in the foyer with other Christians.
Now I should confess that I worry my article comes off as too sectarian. A not insignificant portion of my argument suggests that a movement’s shibboleths, its distinctive practices (think, for Churches of Christ, a cappella music and not calling ministers “pastors”), that these are instrumental in forming Christians. My aim, however, is not to argue that all shibboleths are good or that those who do not share that distinctive are wrong; rather, I am arguing that one cannot learn a sanitized, common denominator form of Christianity, and what is more, one cannot be brought into a sanitized, common denominator community of saints—one is always brought into a particular community with particular practices.
Having said all this, people much smarter than myself do seem to think that the Great Tradition and the Apostles’ Creed and the writings of Irenaeus are some sort of silver bullet. And maybe they’re right. I should, I guess, study it a little bit more. It can’t hurt to want to know more about that core Christian faith passed down from the Apostles to the present.