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| "In proportion, however, as the Church is thus brought into prominent and principal view, her History must also become for theologians an object of attention and inquiry. Church and History altogether, since the introduction of Christianity, are so closely united, that respect and love towards the first, may be said to be essentially the same with a proper sense of what is comprised in the other. The Christian Church is itself the greatest fact in the history of the world, by which the ancient order of life both Jewish and Heathen has been overturned, and the way opened for a new course of existence altogether. Almost nothing has since occurred that can be counted great and important, which is not found to stand in nearer or more remote, friendly or hostile, connexion with the Church, and to acquire its true historical significance precisely from this relation. History, on the other hand, is the bearer of the Church; by whose means this last is made to possess a real existence, whereas, under any other form it could be nothing better than a baseless, fantastic abstraction, which for us who are ourselves the product of history, and draw from it all the vigour of our lives, would have no meaning or value whatever."Â --Philip Schaff, What is Church History?
This astounding opening brings together all the essential principles of the Mercersburg system, and reveals its telos: the historical triumph of supernature over nature, of God over man and man over the world. It therefore warrants considerable attention and discussion.
We may distill three principles from this quote: first, the Church necessarily unfolds through history, and could have no meaning except by being historical ; second, because of this, Church History is intimately bound up with the nature of the Church as such; and third, for this reason, Church History is of utmost importance for the Christian.
The first principle follows from the discussion of the visible/invisible distinction above. For Nevin and Schaff, the visible, historical Church is inseparable from the invisible, timeless Church--it is indeed its necessary manifestation. There is no question of a true Church existing in a transcendent realm beyond time and space, of which the Church we see is merely some vague corollary. No, if the Church is to have reality at all, it must be a reality which actualizes itself in space and time. And of course, at the risk of being redundant, we will remember that this is so because the Church springs out of the Incarnation, in which God declared that his saving power must be something which was actualized in space and time. But more importantly, the Church must be historical because God has a historical plan for His creation. Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation--Âthe whole order of the world's life flows forward, first as a degeneration toward death and separation from God, then after the Incarnation, as an eternal regeneration towards life and union with God. God has willed neither that the glorification of mankind take place in an instant, nor that man be divorced from time and the world to be clothed with his glorified state. For it is not just man who is to be redeemed; the God-man came for the life of the world, and through His saving power in the Church, the whole world must be transformed into a new creation, to the glory of God the Father. This story of transformation is the story of History, and it is thus through history that the Church becomes the Church and accomplishes her God-given task to disciple the nations.
--excerpt from my thesis, first draft (in progress)
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| I wrote this as my book review for History and the Christian Tradition at Oxford.
Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past
by Euan Cameron
In Interpreting Christian History, church historian Euan Cameron reflects on the challenges facing churches that are trying to come to grips with the history of Christianity. In many ways this is simply another manifestation of the age-old philosophical problem of unity and diversity—how do we reconcile the concept of a unified Christian truth with the multiplicity of the versions of Christian truth proclaimed throughout the ages? Cameron seeks to avoid both dogmatism and relativism while doing justice to the many facets of this dilemma, and while on the whole his arguments are solid, he does not appear to quite measure up to his own standards of proper Christian historiography.
Cameron begins by giving a concise yet thorough and perceptive sketch of twenty centuries of Church history. He then sets forth his thesis that will guide the discussion for the remainder of the book: any view which regards the essential doctrines of Christianity as timeless throughout the ages of Church history—a sort of Aristotelian concept of an unchanging essence and unimportant ever-shifting accidents—fails to do justice to the cultural diversity in Church history. Instead, he says, we must take a historical approach that evaluates Christianity on the basis of its many different manifestations in many different cultures.
Cameron elaborates on this problem by discussing the issue of shifting emphases in Church history. Different eras in the Church, he says, have tended to focus on a secondary aspect of the faith and make it an increasingly high priority, until this finally provokes a counter-reaction which then overly exalts another secondary aspect. He discusses the emphases on asceticism, miracles, martyrdom, the Eucharist, the communion of saints, and doctrinal purity which at one time or another dominated the mindset of the Christian Church.
Next he summarizes some of the approaches to this problem of diversity that various church historians throughout the ages have attempted. He depicts this as a general movement from a positivist, naïve portrayal of the Church as an unchanging institution, to more critical but self-legitimating accounts of church history inspired by the Reformation, to, finally, modern critical historiography which seeks to do justice to the complexities of historical development and cultural diversity. This is, to be sure, an oversimplification of his account, but that is the rough structure of it.
He moves on to evaluate the ways in which some theologians and philosophers have approached the issue of diversity in Church history. He posits three main questions which these thinkers have interacted with in some way or another: what should the fact of the diversity of Church history mean to Christians today? How should the views of earlier Christians modify our own views of Christianity? How reliable is our perception of the “core” of Christianity? He examines these questions by critical analysis of the thought of such thinkers as Feuerbach, von Harnack, Troeltsch, Barth, Bultmann, Pannenberg, Lindbeck, and Milbank. The details of this analysis are too complex to be summarized here, but Cameron’s conclusion is that the various attempts to extract a “timeless Christianity,” whether the liberalism of Bultmann or the neo-orthodoxy of Barth, have all been recognized as problematic, though more relativistic approaches like that of Lindbeck have shortcomings as well. Ultimately, Cameron boils it down to two main approaches: the “essentialist,” which claims that there exists a core Christianity throughout the many changing historical manifestations of it, or the “nominalist,” which sees the Christianities of different eras as sharing little but their name, and in which none can claim priority or supremacy over another.
Cameron concludes by suggesting the specific challenges confronting each approach. A good nominalist church historian must seek to show the lines of development which led from each manifestation of Christianity to another, rather than just representing each “Christianity” as an isolated phenomenon. However, the essentialist, he argues, faces even greater difficulties, for once we try to isolate this essence, we must either strip it down to a barren metaphysical formula, very alien to the true spirit of Christianity, or clothe it in trappings which reflect our own cultural setting, and thus fall back into the problem of cultural diversity. To prove his point, he demonstrates what he considers the very narrow-minded and culturally isolated nature of the doctrines which C.S. Lewis sets forth as “mere” Christianity, in his book of that name. The only solution, he suggests, is for each individual to “reach out and grope toward that ‘essence.’ ” This essence cannot be grounded on anything visible and objective, since all such manifestations of the faith are culturally conditioned and hence not objective; it must merely be the individual’s subjective apprehension of the Christian essence, about which he must avoid dogmatism. The answer to this problem lies in the realm of faith, not of history, suggests Cameron in the final paragraph of the book.
While Cameron succeeds in raising some extremely important issues with which the Church must come to terms, and articulates the specific difficulties very insightfully, his final answer to the problem is profoundly unsatisfactory on a number of levels. The issues he raises are indeed quite important for every Christian to grapple with, and his warnings against any simple identification of our own perception of Christianity with a timeless essence of Christianity are much needed.
However, he does not always seem to adhere to his own standard. Several times throughout the book he seems to forget himself and begins using his own particular perception of his own particular era’s theology as a yardstick for making judgments about another era. For example, discussing the Crusades, he declares, “Interfaith warfare is now rightly seen as deplorable by all responsible religious people,” imposing both his judgment of “rightly” and his judgment of what constitutes a “responsible” religious person. Later, when discussing the view which he calls “naïve absolutism,” he says, “In its most extreme, rationalistic form this artificial absoluteness arranges its understanding of the entire world according to the needs of its doctrines,” and cites as an example the rejection of evolution by some Christians today. While part of his critique of this viewpoint is certainly on-target, one could certainly dispute his labeling of this as “rationalistic”—if anything the error here is fideism. Furthermore, those of this viewpoint could quite reasonably reply that if Scripture is our ultimate standard (which is by no means an “extreme” view within the spectrum of Christianity, having been held fairly universally throughout Christian history until very recent times), then of course we must structure our understanding of the entire world according to it. One may perhaps challenge the exegesis on particular points, but to dismiss this whole concept as “extreme,” “naïve,” and “absolutist” would condemn the vast majority of Christianity and declare only Cameron’s own modern liberalism to be a valid form of the faith.
Most troubling, though is Cameron’s conclusion, which, seeming to hold out the promise of solving the dilemma between essentialism and relativism, ends up just throwing up its hands and relegating the question to another realm. To be sure, there is something valuable in Cameron’s assertion that the answer to this dilemma lies in the realm of faith, not of history. Yet the way in which Cameron does this, insisting that “essence” may only discovered by each individual in his own personal quest, unnecessarily polarizes faith and history and amounts to a capitulation to relativism.
A more helpful solution perhaps lies in returning to the roots of “nominalism,” a term Cameron also uses for the relativist position. William of Ockham, the founder of nominalism, while he argued strongly that categories do not have a common nature beyond merely sharing the names with which we choose to designate them, did not mean by this that these categories are completely meaningless and arbitrary. Rather, the names and categories with which we choose to designate things are based upon the names with which God designates them; we are able to speak of things having a certain nature because God so declared them. Applying this sort of understanding to Christianity, we would say that we designate Christianity according to what God declares about it. And Christ declares, “Lo, I will be with you always” (Mt. 28:20) and “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (Jn. 16:13) and “On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Mt. 16:18). In other words, God promises to preserve His Church, abide with it, and maintain it in the truth. While this still doesn’t tell us much about the content of that truth, it at least commits us to an objective foundation for what we designate as the “essence” of Christianity, rather than leaving us to rely on mere subjective perceptions, as Cameron seems to.
Furthermore, while Cameron seems eager to emphasize the negatives, our inability to come to objective conclusions about Scripture or the past, this sort of epistemology is unrealistic in practice. The approach of “critical realism,” articulated by N.T. Wright in his New Testament and the People of God, gives us a much more stable foundation for actually approaching the world: yes, our observations about facts will turn out to largely reflect merely our own subjective wishes, and thus merely give us facts about ourselves; however, we do not need to stop there but may then, by cross-examining ourselves and what we are observing, arrive at some limited, provisional truth. So it is when looking at Christian history. While we must be cautious, we can make generalizations about a number of things which the Church has held in common throughout the centuries. These need not have been held by every Christian in every period to be valid; any tradition or school of thought reserves the right to designate certain extremes as outside the pale, particularly when these extreme views were held by those uneducated in the faith. It is certainly reasonable to, in some measure, limit the views of the faith under consideration to those articulated by the most knowledgeable expositors of the faith. Cameron also appears somewhat one-sided in his emphasis that all Christians are products of their time, and thus cannot designate a body of timeless Christian beliefs without merely imposing their own cultural manifestation of the faith. Instead we find that some great minds in the history of the Church have succeeded in overcoming many of the prejudices of their time and creating syntheses that have functioned across cultures and aeons, men like Augustine, Aquinas, or even Richard Hooker, the father of Anglicanism.
None of this is to deny Cameron’s main premise or to suggest that we can in fact simply identify the beliefs of any era with timeless Christian truth, or that we can make naïve assertions about what constitutes the essence of Christian belief. Nevertheless, while there is ample need for caution, there is no reason to deny that the essential truths of Christianity do endure throughout the history of the Church, or to deny that we can come to any conclusions about what those truths are. On the contrary, we are bound by faith to affirm both of these things, and thus to affirm the existence not merely of churches’ history, but of Church history.
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| One of the noblest passages in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, at the conclusion of Hooker's brilliant discussion of the Lord's Supper:
“Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting myself at the Lord’s table to know what there I receive from him, without searching or inquiring of the manner how Christ performeth his promise; let disputes and questions, enemies to piety, abatements of true devotion, and hitherto in this cause but over patiently heard, let them take their rest; let curious-witted men beat their heads about what questions themselves will, the very letter of the word of Christ giveth plain security that these mysteries do as nails fasten us to his very Cross, that by them we draw out, as touching efficacy, force, and virtue, even the blood of his gored side, in the wounds of our Redeemer we there dip our tongues, we are dyed red both within and without, our hunger is satisfied and our thirst forever quenched; they are things wonderful which he feeleth, great which he seeth and unheard of which he uttereth, whose soul is possessed of this Paschal Lamb and made joyful in the strength of this new wine, this bread hath in it more than the substance which our eyes behold, this cup hallowed with solemn benediction availeth to the endless life and welfare both of soul and body, in that it serveth as well for a medicine to heal our infirmities and purge our sins as for a sacrifice of thanksgiving, with touching it sanctifieth, it enlighteneth with belief, it truly conformeth us unto the image of Jesus Christ; what these elements are in themselves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body and blood of Christ, his promise in witness hereof sufficeth, his word he knoweth which way to accomplish; why should any cogitation possess the mind of a faithful communicant but this, ‘O my God thou art true, O my soul thou art happy!”
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| “What is it but the selfsame error and misconceit, wherewith others being at this day likewise possessed, they ask us where our Church did lurk, in what cave of the earth it slept for so many hundreds of years together before the birth of Martin Luther? As if we were of opinion that Luther did erect a New Church of Christ. No, the Church of Christ which was from the beginning is and continueth unto the end: of which Church all parts have not been always equally sincere and sound. . . . We hope therefore that to reform ourselves if at any time we have done amiss, is not to sever ourselves from the Church we were of before. In the Church we were, and we are so still. Other difference between our estate before and now we know none but only such as we see in Judah; which having sometime been idolatrous became afterwards more soundly religious by renouncing idolatry and superstition. . . . Notwithstanding so far as we lawfully may, we have held and do hold fellowship with them. For even as the Apostle doth say of Israel that they are in one respect enemies but in another beloved of God; in like sort with Rome we dare not communicate concerning sundry her gross and grievous abominations, yet touching those main parts of Christian truth wherein they constantly still persist, we gladly acknowledge them to be of the family of Jesus Christ; and our hearty prayer unto God Almighty is, that being conjoined so far forth with them, they may at the length (if it be his will) so yield to frame and reform themselves, that no distraction remain in any thing, but that we ‘all may with one heart and one mouth glorify God the Father of our Lord and Saviour,’ whose Church we are.”
--from the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1593 | | |
| Here's the initial (and likely to remain for a long time the only) draft of the General Introduction to my thesis. The introduction has several more sections which I am currently in the process of writing (though I just now learned that Jesse's computer has destroyed them...).
Today
as we look around at the state of Protestantism in America, we see
the Church in ruins, lacking vision, direction, unity, or even a
clear sense of its own identity. Denominations continue to
proliferate, and many churches, too independent even to feel at home
in one of these new micro-denominations, choose to act as their own
“non-denominational” body. Even the Reformed Presbyterians,
with their “high ecclesiology,” have so thoroughly lost sight of
the deeper issues of the Church that they are reduced to wrangling
with their Baptist brethren over the superiority of their
presbyterial form of polity (which they then proceed to eloquently
demonstrate by, every few years, leaving it and setting up a new one
with “tighter doctrinal standards”). An increasing number of
exasperated and disillusioned Protestants, in the search for
something at least vaguely resembling the mystical Body of Christ,
have turned to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
Remarkably,
this distressing turn of events is not as new as many have thought.
More than 150 years ago, it was foreseen and prophesied by the great
Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin. In his day, for the most
part, the Reformed churches of America still had enough lingering
sense of the high majesty and history of the Church that they
remained outwardly the strong and stalwart heirs of the Reformation
that they claimed to be. But Nevin knew that the reigning Reformed
scholasticism did not possess the theological resources to cope with
the swelling tide of sectarian subjectivism and arid rationalism, the
twin daughters of the Enlightenment which threatened to overwhelm
American Christianity. He saw that Princeton Seminary’s great war
against revivalism was no more than a little scrap between the
Jacobins and the Girondins of Protestantism, the radical
individualists and the more hesitant individualists. On his reading
of the American religious climate, the only solution to the woes
coming upon American Christianity was a return to the historical
Reformational faith in the visible church as the true Body of Christ,
the meeting place between God and His people. And, so far as he
could tell, there was no one left in the American Reformed corridors
of power who would still stand for this faith.
So,
in 1843, from the tiny German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pa.,
he wrote The Anxious Bench,
a devastating critique of revivalism in all its forms, turning a few
heads, but failing to generate a large-scale response from a
religious public already saturated with pro- and anti-revivalism
tracts. But the next year, with the arrival of Philip Schaff, a 25
year-old prodigy fresh from the great universities of Germany, Nevin
and his young colleague began to put Mercersburg on the map with
their fierce critiques of sectarianism in American Protestantism.
Nevin’s publication of The Mystical Presence,
a full-blown historical vindication of a richly sacramental and
ecclesiocentric Reformed faith in 1847, drew Charles Hodge, the
Colossus who bestrode the narrow world of Reformed orthodoxy, into
the fray. For the next four years, and intermittently thereafter, a
fierce war of pens was waged between Mercersburg and much of the rest
of the American Reformed world. From Nevin’s perspective, it was a
battle for the soul of American Protestantism, one that, in his own
day, he lost.
The
prevailing Reformed orthodoxy of Charles Hodge and Princeton Seminary
ensured that the Mercersburg theology always remained a fringe
movement, both in the churches and the history books. Most
portrayals of 19th-century Reformed theology have continued to follow
the paradigm of Princeton’s self-perception: a long war between the
conservative heirs of the Reformation and their innovating opponents
the revivalists, followed by the beginning of a war against their
still more innovating opponents the liberals. When the
arch-conservative Hodge encountered Nevin, he was for once flummoxed,
for at last he had met an opponent who was, in many ways at least,
more conservative than he. From Nevin’s perspective, it was Hodge
who was innovating. Thus neither Hodge nor the history books have
been sure quite what to do with the Mercersburg Theology, and its
defiance of the traditional paradigm has resulted in its near
extinction in both the ecclesiological and academic realms.
I
believe that a better paradigm for understanding this crucial era in
church history is to see it as a war over who the true heirs of the
Reformation were, the last rear-guard of those who held to a
sacramental and churchly system of religion, or the individualist
sons of the Enlightenment. Though, as with everything in history, it
was not nearly that simple, I believe that the conflict between Nevin
and Hodge, Mercersburg and Princeton, is the clearest picture of this
war in action. This thesis will seek to delineate as clearly as
possible some of the main battle-lines in this debate, explore the
implications that the different positions had for ecclesiology and
church history, and allow Nevin and his fierce love for Mother Church
to speak to a new generation, a generation in dire need of his urgent
warnings.
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