merefaith: discipleship in the ruins of empire

My friend Jacob's question given in his comment to my previous post is a good and worthy one. What kind of authority would the ecumenical councils (and, perhaps most importantly, the creeds they produced: Nicene, Chalcedonian) have in the baptistic paradigm of congregationalism?

It might seem at the outset that the creeds would be given no validity in such an ecclesiology. First, there is the fear that they take away from the authority of Scripture. Second, they are often interpreted as having been imposed upon the early church by emperor and bishop and thus might be forced upon churches as alien "litmus tests" today. Third, the introduction of an external creed may be understood as a violation of the rights and responsibility of each congregation to discern the mind of Christ in their own context.

I will examine these potential objections in reverse order. The final charge against creeds reflects an assumption that congregational authority is properly understood as congregational independence and "autonomy." While "local church autonomy" is often labeled a "Baptist distinctive" in our day and age, in truth Baptists have largely believed that each church is also answerable to the the larger association and assemblies for guidance, correction, and mutual admonition. For example, the 1644 London Confession declared that, although each congregation is a distinct body, "yet are they all to walk by one and the same Rule, and by all means convenient to have the counsel and help one of another in all needful affairs of the Church, as members of one body in the common faith." Or, as Nigel Wright of Spurgeon's College puts it in his book Free Church, Free State: The Positive Baptist Vision, a congregation's prerogatives do not include redefining the essential Christian faith. The Baptist vision is not properly marked by an "anything goes" or "I'm ok, you're ok" attitude; nevertheless, it is defined by a belief that congregations sincerely seeking the mind of Christ, internally and externally, will move toward a unity that is not coerced or imposed, as Yoder states. Part of that movement toward unity includes the recognition that the faith taught and lived by a particular church is also the faith defined and symbolized in such a statement as the Nicene Creed.

Moving to the second objection, we see that this is in fact, historically, the way the creeds were received. As Baptist patristics scholar D.H. Williams says, "Credal statements had to represent the common mind of the church or else they would not be accepted and employed by the wider body of believing Christians" (Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism, 155f.). We look at Nicea as a watershed moment but it took decades for the formula drawn up by the bishops to become accepted. D.H. Williams again:

Even the epithet "ecumenical" was assigned to the Council of Nicaea, in the
sense of being a special and definitive category of synod, only gradually.
The problem of the "fall" paradigm with regard to Nicaea is that it exaggerates
the centrality of the council's position in history, even though little
acknowledgment owas made of its creed for roughly thirty years. Evidently,
it was not at all clear to the majority of bishops after the council that the
Nicene Creed was the best articulation of the Christian doctrine of God (162).

Indeed, the creed remained controversial and alternatives were presented during the next quarter-century. Most churches continued to prefer their own local, pre-existing creeds for baptismal interrogations. Only in the mid-350s did the Nicene Creed start to emerge as the singular orthodox standard. Even then it continued to be opposed. The Council of Ariminum (359), the largest so far in the west, rejected the Nicene Creed and put forth a substitute. Over time, however, Nicea was "proven and internalized by the life experience of the churches (Williams, 163)." Even in Orthodox literature I have seen the point made that a creed or ecumenical council decision is only truly thus once approved by the faithful. In other words, the authority of creed and council is something tested, discerned, and then either received or rejected...by local gatherings of believers seeking the mind and will of Christ. D.H. Williams concludes his chapter on councils and creeds by noting, contra Vatican II, that the early church did not view councils as infallible or as oracles of divine revelation.

Finally, the creeds are properly understood as derivative of Scripture, marking out the space in which interpretations are understood as faithful and excluding interpretations that make Scripture incoherent. The most controversial element of the Nicene Creed's formulation, homoousios, was controversial precisely because it was not Scriptural language, and it took Athanasius' persuasive argumentation to show that it cohered with biblical testimony. As the history of drawing up confessions of faith shows, Baptists are not averse to making claims about what they believe are the sensible and valid interpretations of faith to be proclaimed and to which assent is encouraged.

So how have Baptists interpreted the theological value of the creeds and councils? It must be admitted that there is a mixed history. However, it is clear that the "no creed but the Bible" claim is derivative of the Stone-Campbell movement in the southern United States and not an original Baptist principle. The early General Baptist leader Thomas Grantham declared that the Nicene, Chalcedonian and Athanasian creeds should be received and believed by all, and this was also the conclusion of the Generals' Orthodox Creed of 1678. At the first meeting of the Baptist World Alliance in 1905, Alexander MacLaren asked, as the first order of business, that all delegates stand and recite the Apostles' Creed as an affirmation of their shared faith with the church catholic. The delegates could recite the creed from memory (a feat not repeated at the centennial celebration in 2005, in which a projector was required!).

Baptistic theological writings have, to various degrees, stressed the validity of the creeds and councils. D.H. Williams finds engagement with the historic tradition necessary and unavoidable but cautions against labeling the patristic creeds as "inerrant" (Evangelicals and Tradition, 78). James McClendon reiterates that creeds have no status as supplemental authorities, but "they may briefly witness to the truth that is more fully witnessed in Scripture. And, indeed, according to their authors, that was the point fo the early creeds; their makers always understood them as guides to the reading of Scripture" (Doctrine, 470). Creeds are "monuments of tradition" that tell us how Scripture has been read and "invite us to read it that way if we can" (471). The most overtly positive assessment of the creeds perhaps comes from Stephen Holmes in his book Listening to teh Past: The Place of Tradition in Theology. He surveys potential methods for rejecting the Nicene Creed but, pointing to the strong consensus of the universal Church over space and time, concludes, "I find it difficult to envisage a situation in which there could be sufficient evidence to doubt the Nicene Creed" (161). What Holmes is doing, I conceive, is extending the logic of trust in Christ's Lordship and the Spirit's guidance outward from the local congregation and into the Church as the whole Body of Christ. Proper discernment of the mind of Christ entails recognizing the authority of the entire community of saints. Finally, this is the point and title of a chapter in Steven Harmon's book Towards Baptist Catholicity. It would take much time to reproduce it here, but this chapter, "The Authority of the Community (of All the Saints): Towards a Postmodern Baptist Hermeneutic of Tradition," is an extended examination of how the Baptist understanding of the derivative authority of a church as covenant community opens the way toward recognizing the derivative authority of the entire communio sanctorum in interpreting the convictions and duties of the Christian faith.

So what kind of authority do the ecumenical councils have? The same kind of authority as that of a local church meeting, a synod, a general assembly, or a convention. The councils have moral and hermeneutical authority by virtue of the fact that they were gatherings of Christians, intentionally brought together in prayer and worship, that sought to discern what the Spirit says to the churches. It is an authority of testimony that is then weighed, tested, and deliberated over by each church. With Holmes and Harmon I would argue that the Nicene Creed, for example, has been so heavily tested and affirmed as to place an enormously strong burden of proof on the church that chooses to reject it. With the entire Baptist tradition and with Yoder, meanwhile, I contend that the acceptance of councils and creeds must be a process of mutual recognition and affirmation in which nothing is coerced or imposed, but rather that churches in sincere and genuine discernment come to realize that they faith they seek to live and teach is one and the same with the faith presented by another deliberative body that has previously placed itself under Christ's Lordship. We are responsible for each other but we must not lord it over each other. I believe that the way forward must live in that balance.

Labels: Baptist Catholicity, Baptists, Historia, Theology

Posted by Chris Schelin at Thursday, November 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments

The first week of studies at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague has concluded. I will spend most of the day tomorrow hitting the books in the library. This evening, however, I took the metro into the city center and walked around the Old Town Square. A statue of Jan Hus, Bohemia's great 15th-century reformer and national hero, stands in the center.

Labels: Historia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Friday, August 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments

I've been on something of an American Revolution kick lately. Just over a week ago I got back from taking my youth group on a mission trip to the Philadelphia metro area. So we naturally went into town to visit the historic sites: Christ Church, the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall...oh, and a ghost tour around much of this at night (grin). Adding fuel to the fire, Kelly and I also recently watched the wonderful movie version of the Broadway musical 1776.

Perhaps it is somewhat heretical for a Yoderian pacifist to admit this, but for the longest time I've been fascinated with this period of history: the development of colonial America, the struggle for independence, and the fashioning of a new experiment in representative government. My interest has a broad base, resting as it does on everything from the aesthetics of Georgian architecture and urban design (ah, Charleston!) to the audacity of politicans and activists who pursued rebellion and political reform. The stories from this time are many, complex, and deep.

But again, being a Christian shaped by Anabaptistic political theology, I have at least some inclination to move on and dismiss this period as irrelevant at best or idolatrous at worst. In fact, an idolatry of the American founding is inescapable since it is ritually exercised at least each July 4. At that time of the year most in this country reassure themselves with simplistic mythologies about what happened in these crucial years, why it all happened, and how. The Founding Fathers (capital letters, of course) achieve apotheosis in the national consciousness as we ignore the fact that they were typically elitist, sexist and racist. The new nation they created limited the vote to white males who surpassed the minimum property requirement, broke repeated treaties with Native American tribes as settlers pushed across the Appalachians, and retained over half a million human beings in chains. And, as we all know, this wasn't a nonviolent revolution they practiced on the way to independence.

Highly critical accounts of the American Revolution, such as the relevant section of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, argue that the war for independence was no revolution at all. A self-interested foreign elite was simply replaced by a self-interested domestic elite. Americans opposed sensible British policies - fair taxes to pay for the French and Indian war and a western border to protect Indian tribes - and turned them into a pretext for rebellion. Political reforms were either already underway before the war or came about after independence in spite of the founders' own desires and intentions.

The charges are lengthy and serious enough to satisfy any Christian who will brook no patriotism but that which declares our citizenship is in heaven. And yet, while I have been one to dismiss the American Revolution in this way, I keep returning to my fascination. I remember how much I admire John Adams, particularly as he is rendered in David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning bography. When I read The Democratization of American Christianity, I was struck by example after example of how the common person internalized the Revolution as an open door to a new era of liberty; in fact, an era of freedom to be actor rather than acted, subject rather than object. There were figures I find inspirational and there were people who found inspiration. Maybe something more was at stake than a hissy fit between one set of dead white males and another.

So I've been doing some reading to help get a nuanced take on the Revolution - and, from there, to begin to think theologically about its character, aims and participants. The most helpful book I have read so far has been Joseph Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Ellis is a historian of the Revolution who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book Founding Brothers and has also written a biography of George Washington (His Excellency). While his attitude toward the Revolution is quite positive, Ellis is also realistic about the shortcomings of the American founding.

Each chapter highlights a particular experience of America's establishment from 1776 to 1803. Ellis considers the steps toward declaring independence and then the experience of the Continental Army at Valley Forge that led Washington and his lieutenants to believe a strong national government would be necessary. He details the argument over the Constitution as a betrayal or fulfillment of the republican project. Next, he shows how Washington, under the inspiration of Henry Knox, sought a doomed treaty that would recognize the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River as foreign nations to be respected and protected from encroachment. Ellis then turns to the evolution of the two-party system (which he views favorably) before concluding with the story of the Louisiana Purchase.

The main idea I gained is that the multiplicity of interpretations about the Revolution and the early American experiment began not with scholarly studies decades later but in the actual experience itself. Adams and Jefferson, he writes, went to their graves arguing about what they actually founded and how they had done it. The supporters of independence were a strange mix of conservatives opposing Britain on the matter of a constitutional question, but determined to preserve the status quo as much as possible, and radicals, like Thomas Paine, who called for a root-and-branch renovation of the body politic. It was Paine, for example, who successfully counseled the independent Vermont Republic to inscribe universal male suffrage in its 1777 constitution.

As Ellis tells it, the founders were "making it up as they went along." A diversity of voices improvising a rebellion left their mark not by creating the purest and best government. Rather, what they succeeded in doing was institutionalizing argument as instrinsic and beneficial to sound governance. In that vein, the American Revolution created a kind of politics similar to tradition as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre. Just as he suggests tradition is itself an extended argument about the goods that constitute tradition, so did republican politics in America become an extended argument about the goods that constitute a just republic. The enshrining of argument has in essence extended the Revolution beyond the intial founding, through the course of American history, and into the indefinite future. That is why Americans have typically interpreted such movements as women's suffrage and civil rights as organic developments of the founding instead of altogether new creations.

While I will continue to regret that the Revolution was a violent affair, and while the ethical and social shortcomings of its leaders remain worthy of condemnation, I think a Yoderian Christian can applaud the Revolution's gradual opening to the dignity of difference. For while, being a nation-state, America's godlike pretensions remain, and while Christians must still bear witness to an alternative politics, we can at least acknowledge that the founding created a system that respects the right to come to the table...and start arguing!

Labels: Historia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Sunday, July 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments

"What is Jerusalem worth?"


This question is asked near the conclusion of the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005). The Christians are about to surrender Jerusalem to Saladin and his army. The main character, Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), has successfully resisted the siege long enough to reach favorable terms for the city's inhabitants. Long since disillusioned about the purported holiness of the Holy Land, Balian wonders what justification may be offered for the carnage that he has witnessed.

"Nothing," Saladin replies as he turns to walk away. Then he stops and looks back.

"Everything."

I guess this is supposed to be profound. So is the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, Ridley Scott has given us banality and simplicity rendered within an ahistorical mess. We get it, Mr. Scott, we get it. The "idea" of Jerusalem, a place where one has equal standing before God, where one finds grace and enlightenment and warm fuzzies, that is worth everything. The brick-and-mortar city is no more important than any other. Next episode of "School House Rock," please.

Kingdom of Heaven tries to say something about our current global situation by illuminating the past, but it fails on both counts. This is largely the fault of its moralizing anachronisms. The protagonists of the film are too busy sounding like 21st-century multiculturalist progressives to be believable. Some critics who have reviewed the film suggested that it may be impossible to make a Middle Ages movie that is both generally faithful to the period and yet palatable to modern film audiences. Becket, anyone?


While the film is a general disappointment, one thing I have gained from it is an ongoing fascination with the realm whose collapse it narrates: the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem that was established after the First Crusade. When I saw the movie in theaters, it was the first time I really understood that something more happened between this crusade and that. I had never thought about what life in the region was like after the Western Christians captured and held Jerusalem.

There were other states established after the First Crusade as well: the counties of Edessa and Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch. But Jerusalem was the largest, most prestigious, and longest-lasting of these states. And, of course, the Kingdom encompassed the holiest and most contested sites. In this kingdom one could encounter a strange, dynamic, complex mix of Christian sects and Muslim communities and multiple languages and ethnicities. It wasn't a harmonious melting plot, but it was anything but bland. Here, West and East found themselves face-to-face long before free trade and globalization.

Kingdom of Heaven, ahistorically, portrays the Latin Kingdom as generally being that melting pot - a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims live together in peace and with respect for each other. Good King Baldwin IV ensures this harmony and works hand-in-hand with Saladin to keep tensions from boiling over into open conflict. That peace is only disturbed by the unhappy fundamentalists on both sides, whether the Knights Templar and newcomers from Europe on the one hand or the religious advisors to Saladin on the other.

Ironically, this progressive movie has adopted a reactionary portrait of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A number of postwar French historians argued that the kingdom was, in fact, an integrated society. This offered a convenient justification for the contemporary French colonial holdings in Syria and Algeria. If their Frankish forebears could humanely rule foreign territories in the past, why couldn't they do so again under de Gaulle? Let's all get together and sing Kum Ba Yah...or at least La Marseillaise.

The pendulum soon swung the other way, and around the 1970s medieval historians argued that Jerusalem was something else entirely: a completely segregated society in which the Frankish lords kept their own institutions and customs, remained aloof from the native population, and treated their colonized subjects with disdain. The contemporary parallel shifted from Algeria to minority-rule apartheid in South Africa.

These historians had good reason to argue thus. The supposedly enlightened and tolerant Baldwin IV of the movie was nicknamed "the pig" by Muslims in Galilee. The Code of Nablus, a body of laws drawn up in 1120, forbade intermarriage between Christians and Muslims. The latter were banned from owning property in the cities and, like the Christians under Muslim rule, paid an extra tax.

However, the record is not uniformly oppressive. First of all, the simple question of Christian-Muslim relations ignores the fact that perhaps up to half the population of Palestine when the crusaders arrived was still Christian. They weren't Catholic Christians, mind you. Some were Greek holdovers from Byzantine days and thus were Eastern Orthodox. But most were Syrian Christians who belonged either to the "Nestorian" or the "Monophysite" church. While the Frankish rulers and settlers may have been inclined to view the Syrians and Greeks as heretics or schismatics, some historians have recently begun to speak of a fairly well-integrated Franco-Syrian society in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Franks adopted the local dress and some local customs. They also intermarried with Syrian Christians at all levels of society, including the royal family. Peasant immigrants from Europe settled in Syrian Christian villages or started new villages nearby. Franks and Syrians often shared public spaces such as churches.

But was there any assimilation with the Muslim population, or at least any genuine efforts at understanding or coexistence? While archaeological surveys suggest segregation in rural areas, the cities were genuinely cosmopolitan. While Muslims were disallowed from owning property in the cities, there were plenty of renters. Muslim traders, merchants and artisans (and, unfortunately, slaves) mingled in close quarters with the Franks as well as Italian merchants and seamen. Although Muslims were initially banned from Jerusalem, by the time of its fall to Saladin several thousand lived there - enough that Balian of Ibelin supposedly threatened their massacre if favorable terms of surrender were not reached. However, it should be noted that in legal documentation, the kingdom recognized in principle that the Saracens "are men just like the Franks." A Muslim could sue a Frank over unpaid debt. Some Frankish knights gained battle experience by serving in Muslim armies. Mosques and shrines in the Kingdom of Jerusalem were open for worship and, according to historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, there was even a mosque-church. Tolerance in some form, if not principled, was at least beneficial both to business and security.

Meanwhile, there are various accounts of friendship and respect between Muslims and Frankish Christians. Perhaps most of these exchanges were characterized by a deep ambiguity inherent to the geopolitical circumstances. Examples include the Muslim merchant Usama ibn Mundiqh, who could describe the Franks as animals in one paragraph of his autobiography and in the next praise their religious devotion, or at another point laud a Frankish knight for rescuing an associate from a lynch mob in Antioch and then entertaining him at his home. Or consider the aforementioned Balian. The same man who threatened massacre was also apparently a friend of Saladin. After escaping Hattin, he swore an oath not to take up arms against the sultan, only to have the citizens of Jerusalem prevail upon him to lead the defense of the city. Balian wrote a letter to Saladin explaining why he broke his promise. Saladin forgave Balian and allowed him to go free once Jerusalem surrendered.



A purportedly less ambiguous figure was Raymond III of Tripoli, a leading noble in the kingdom and competitor to Guy of Lusignan for succession to the throne in 1186. Raymond had spent eleven years in captivity under the Muslims, learned Arabic, and grew to respect his adversaries. He may have believed that genuine coexistence was possible, and he also counted Saladin as a friend. By contrast, Reynald of Chatillon also spent several years in captivity and learned to hate Muslims with a tremendous ferocity.

In the end, however, a genuine pluralism was impossible. The founding ideology of the Kingdom was the crusade to liberate territories that were considered rightfully Christian. Any respect that Muslims developed for the Western settlers was limited by Islam's own claim to superiority, particularly its inherent conviction that the world is irreconcilably divided into two realms: the advancing Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and the chaotic, degenerate Dar al-Harb (House of War). The Kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly a fascinating mosaic of cultures, languages and traditions, but it was doomed to be a only a fleeting and tense one.

Labels: Historia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Wednesday, April 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments