Can anyone deny that the church in America needs renewal? But just what kind of renewal we need is another question entirely. Do we need revival —meaning, an upsurge of enthusiasm? Do we need reform—that is, a new set of (or new commitment to) doctrines? How about restoration, the resetting of things to an earlier era? There is no shortage of energy and effort currently invested in all of these strategies. My own denomination, the United Methodist Church, has versions of each of these, all intended to renew a church that 250 years ago was itself a renewal movement within the Church of England.
These matters are not trivial. Some of these current renewal movements compete for the same donors and constituents, duplicating each other's work (and in some cases, working against one another). It would be good if we could agree on just what kind of renewal we want so that we can adopt similar strategies to get us there. William J. Abraham wrote
The Logic of Renewal in 2003 to address these questions, and his method of sorting out the various methods is compelling. In seven chapters he pairs together 14 different theologians, essentially setting forth a volume of "contrast and compare" among the different proposals.
Most of the chapters provide a stark contrast between two very different views. For example, the chapter called "Foundations and Food" sets James T. Draper (a fundamentalist Southern Baptist) against Dennis Bennett (a charismatic Episcopalian). Draper asserted that the church lost its way by substituting the reason of a scientific worldview for the revelation of scripture. His plan for renewal was to establish a rule of faith that church leaders could affirm, one that proclaimed the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. (This was a battle he largely won, within the Southern Baptist Convention anyway.) By contrast, Dennis Bennett said that what the church needs most is to be fed, in the form of powerful encounters with the Holy Spirit. If the differences between these two men can be boiled down to a simple formula, one is about the head (renewal comes from right belief) and the other is about the heart (about a direct, emotional touch of the Spirit).
 |
| Lesslie Newbigin |
Each chapter works through similar comparisons, but my favorite is "A Tale of Two Bishops." Here Abraham compares Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) and John Shelby Spong (1931- ). Spong, a retired bishop in the Episcopal church, says that the church needs to get with the program of the modern age, setting aside commitments to antiquated doctrines like the virgin birth and Jesus's bodily resurrection. He has thrown in his lot with the Enlightenment, urging the church to join up with the science that it cannot beat. Newbigin, a British missionary to India who served for years as a bishop in the Church of South India, also recognized a gap between the church and science. Except, unlike Spong, he preached against our captivity to the Enlightenment. His proposal for renewal was to expose these false ways of thinking, which were characterized by dividing up the world into categories that are unfaithful to God's rule over creation. For instance, he wrote that modern people too often unquestionably accept the assumption that the world is divided into distinct categories of facts and values: facts can be proven through observed and repeatable experiments, whereas values are set aside in the realm of personal opinion. Newbigin also wrote that in order for the church to experience renewal we must recover the commitment to faith in the public and private spheres. Faith is far from optional—the very act of knowing anything requires faith in some form of knowledge. It is actually impossible to be a human being without faith—we cannot separate it out from the rest of life. Therefore, the church called to proclaim that Christ is Lord over all things, holding together the systems of knowledge, power, and economy that we have come to idolize (
Col 1:15-20). We don't add Christ onto anything, as a spiritual booster to our existing reality. Christ is already and always the ruler of everything. Renewal won't happen until we can repent of our idolatry and proclaim Jesus as Lord, which is a task that the local church is called to help us see the need for.
Abraham's bigger argument is that renewal requires more than a revolution in philosophy: "for surely we are not healed or saved by philosophy. We are saved and healed by the living God" (p.158). He wants us to see that the traditions of the church—scripture, ordained forms of ministry, the sacraments of Communion and Baptism—are not just the dead weight of tradition. These aspects of our life as a church are the results of past spiritual renewals, ones that were inaugurated by the Triune God: "Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the church; the Holy Spirit constituted the church" (p.158). In short, the church is a gift from God. To Abraham a renewed church is one that comes to grips with the Spirit-filled nature of its systems and structures: "To see this canonical heritage as a gift of the Holy Spirit or as the life of the Holy Spirit in the church radically alters how the various elements are received" (p.161).
I like this proposal, and I agree with what Abraham is suggesting. (One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor is believing that the church is a gift.) That's why I wish he had put all his chips on Newbigin. But, sadly, Abraham dismisses him as too philosophical, failing to see how his own proposal is not far off from Newbigin's. In the last quote listed above, Abraham calls the church "to see." But what is a call "to see" other than an argument to be more philosophical—that is, to construe one's categories of the world a bit differently from other people? That's what Newbigin was doing in calling us to break out of false categories, making illogical separations between faith and reason (or mind and Spirit). He proposed that we find new "plausibility structures"—that is, ways of seeing the world—which we can only do by changing the way we live. That change can only happen when we attach ourselves to a community of people who believe the unbelievable:
How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. (Newbigin in
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p.227)
But these congregations are not just communal gatherings of like-minded people. They are gifts of God, both Christ-instituted and Spirit-filled:
"What He left behind was a fellowship, and He entrusted to it the task of being His representative to the world...He endowed them with His own spirit to be His witnesses. They were given His authority to case out sickness and evil. To receive them was to receive Him, and to reject them was to reject Him." (Newbigin,
The Household of God, p.50).
For Newbigin, the church today is still the same gift that was given to the apostles.
"How is Jesus present to us today?—it is surely clear that at least a very central part of the answer must be: He is present in His people, His apostolic fellowship." (Household, p.50)
I think that Newbigin is calling for the same thing as Abraham. Renewal must come from the church, because the church is a gift from God. Perhaps a part of the next renewal movement will include a reaffirmation of the way we think about the church, helping us to stop seeing it primarily as impediment to faith. If it takes philosophy and new "plausibility structures" to see the church as the active presence of the Spirit-filled Christ in the world, then sign me up.
