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Spiritual Formation
and Christian Discourse
in the
Stone-Campbell Tradition
[An address given on August 8, 2007 at a Stone-Campbell
Conference on Spiritual Formation at Speedway Church of Christ in Speedway,
Indiana, Kent Ellett pastor and conference sponsor. Slightly revised herein.
Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes. Posted here 9/24/07.]
It is an extraordinary pleasure and blessing to be participating in this
conference with brothers and sisters bound together as participants in
and heirs of the Stone-Campbell Movement. It is a further joy to be invited
here by my good friend and former student, Kent Ellett. The sheer delight
of having him as that special sort of student who thinks clearly, believes
deeply, and isn’t afraid to speak up remains vivid in my memory.
But to continue to have him as a conversation-partner in these years of
my so-called retirement summons me to gird up my loins and engage his
most probing questions and earnest proposals.[1] For you who are members
of Kent’s congregation here in Speedway, however much he may prod,
probe, and challenge you to reach beyond your previous habits of thought,
be reassured by me that he speaks with the authority and wisdom of angels
and with the power of a divinely gracious passion.
As a seventy year-old third generation member of the Disciples branch
of the Stone-Campbell movement, I have over the years encountered many
from the Churches of Christ and Independent branches—encountered
them as my students and as folks in the larger American ecclesial culture
who are earnest about the authority of the Bible, the independence of
the congregation, the unflinching inclusion of laity in church governance,
and the unswerving conviction that there is a Gospel rooted in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. [2]
But how might I engage my Movement friends to preserve this passion for
the Gospel and the Bible, while easing them out of that oft-unspoken but
troublesome conviction that the Bible and the ‘facts’ of the
Bible have authority only if the whole of the Bible is inerrant.
Of course, many are they in the Movement who have seen their brothers
and sisters relinquish that conviction only to tumble right off the spectrum
of traditional Christian beliefs. Take a roll in a Unitarian congregation
and you will find many of the broken-hearted who once tabernacled among
the Stone-Campbell Movement but lost an authoritative and salvific Christ
to a “Jesus of history” who died inadvertently but nevertheless
left behind sayings of considerable moral and symbolic value.
It is also continually troubling to me that the Stone-Campbell Movement
has been so focused on the Bible, in particular the New Testament, that
it easily falls into the habit of thinking that tradition and
theology are temptations to be avoided. Just stick with the Bible
only and all will be well. The tradition that folk have in mind when they
think this way is the tradition of the early ecumenical creeds and what
came to be called the Roman Catholic Church. However, it is virtually
unnoticed that all the branches of the Movement are themselves continuing
traditions—as in the traditions of local congregations
with their distinctive ways of ordering their life and thought; as in
the traditions by virtue of which they could identify other congregations
as included in their particular ‘brotherhood’. The Movement
might have rejected some past traditions, but it was practically impossible
to reject all traditioning because they could not continue on into the
future without a sense of who they were, who else was like them, and who
else was faithful in ways that could be trusted.
In this same connection, doing theology was typically considered
speculating beyond what the Bible itself might say. ‘Speculating’
is the right word here, for it was a name for that apparent human reasoning
and invention that went beyond the Bible and sought an authority and truth
independent of the Bible. This negative sense about doing theology was
also tied to a troubled mind about ‘doctrines’ and ‘creeds’.
If theology is be pursued it must be simply ‘biblical theology’;
the Bible and the plain and intelligible ‘facts’ of the Bible
are the ‘givens’ for all church theologizing and teaching.
Yet this suspicion about reasoning and theologizing
often obscured from Movement folk the obvious fact that they are reasoning
all the time as they interpret and infer points from Scripture, make arguments,
draw distinctions, and so on. [3]
Closely linked to these dimensions of our heritage was our wariness of
talking about the Spirit and certainly our reluctance to talk about ‘spirituality’.
To be sure, along with many in American Christianity, we talked excessively
and effusively about faith being a ‘private matter between the individual
and God’, though sometimes we would fall into that American idiom
of saying ‘the individual and his God.’ Even today,
when many other church traditions regard ‘spirituality’ as
an urgent topic for the Christian life, Movement folk still put the emphasis
on the individual and tend to ignore that the individual Christian always
lives in some tradition in the midst of some formative community.
Some Proposals about Spiritual Formation and Christian Discourses
These previous comments are simply intended as appetizers for the topic
I have been assigned for this conference: Spiritual Formation and Christian
Discourse. This actually is a wonderful topic, rich in possibilities of
making some pertinent and hopefully useful remarks about the Christian
life and the church. I propose the following for our consideration:
1. There is no Christian life or spirituality that is
not formed by some tradition or traditions of discourse. Hence, the word
‘discourse’ here simply refers to the many ways in which a
tradition lives in and through its distinctive ways of speaking and acting,
of construing and judging, of thinking and believing, feeling and imagining.
Take away these distinctive linguistic practices and you nullify the tradition
as well. In making these points I am reminding us that the spirituality
the church is concerned about is itself a construction of the
language of the church. [4]
2. All of the primary discourses—the language—of
the Christian church are theological in intent and scope: it
is language about God and human life before God or language
directed to God. Thus the constitutive language of the church
is theological from beginning to end. The hymns we have sung this evening
are theological. Our prayers are theological. Hence, let us give up the
pretense that we are not doing theology or speaking theologically. The
real question, however, is whether what we are doing and saying is good,
true, and faithful theology, and that is a vexing but inescapable question
that requires prolonged and demanding conversation and inquiry.
3. While the discourses of the Bible—what we call
the Old and New Testaments—are the given discourses from which later
traditions learn who God is and what God has done and is doing, it has
never been the case that the discourses of the Bible were available to
anyone apart from some contemporary ecclesial community of interpretation.
As almost all of us Protestants have come to agree, the ecclesial tradition
arising from first century Israel in the proclamation, crucifixion, and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the tradition that brought forth
and determined what would constitute the authoritative canon of the New
Testament. The church’s discourses over the centuries have always
been discourses intending to teach us what the Bible really says,
but now really says according to the community’s own study and interpretation.
Hence, there is no easy answer to the question of which came first, the
church or the New Testament. It was the early apostolic and post-apostolic
church that wrote, preserved, and decided what would count as canonical
texts for the church’s life.
4. When we talk now as Christians about spiritual formation,
we are relying on the distinctive ways in which the church talks about
the shape of the Christian life. In ways conceptually interchangeable,
talk of spiritual life is simply talk about how human life comes
be shaped, formed, transformed, and enlivened by the Holy Spirit. Along
with most church traditions, we have agreed that spiritual formation entails
two overarching prongs of emphasis, both rooted in the prior forgiving
grace of God in Jesus Christ: being formed by a relationship of love to
God and being formed by a relationship of love for the neighbor.
Such formation could also be called discipleship to Jesus Christ
as Lord and Savior. To be spiritual in the Christian sense is to be a
disciple of Jesus—a follower of Jesus and a believer in Jesus’
Gospel. When we tie spirituality to discipleship to Jesus, we should be
able to grasp why spiritual formation is inextricably tied to some distinctive
beliefs and distinctive actions and feelings. These
beliefs and actions/feelings are what can also be called the what
and the how of the Christian life. Saying it another way, in
becoming members of the church as the body of Christ, persons are being
formed by the incarnational narrative of Jesus Christ as the Son of God
and Savior of the world. The Holy Spirit that moves within persons in
the church is simply the Spirit of Jesus Christ and the Spirit of the
Father. [5]
In ways that I hope will become clearer in our conversation together,
I will be contending that the what and the how of Christian
life are intricately and complexly intertwined and interdependent. Hence,
to suppose one can have the whats—the beliefs, the Gospel,
the incarnational narrative—without the how—the way
of life, or the how without the whats is to erroneously
suppose that either can be had without the other.
5. The theological task of sorting out the whats
of Christian faith is crucial to Christian spirituality. It is important
in this regard to notice that every tradition of the church believes there
is at the center of its faith a Gospel—a good news about
what God has done for human salvation—and that Gospel centers on
Jesus Christ. What is that Gospel? Over many years of teaching theology
courses in seminaries I have insisted that each student must be involved
in the process of identifying as clearly and succinctly as he or she can
just what that Gospel is. If we cannot come to some agreement about the
Gospel, then it is irrelevant whether we believe the Bible is inerrant
or not. Further, I propose that how we identify the Gospel will also give
us a clue to how we ought to be reading the Bible. Talk of spiritual formation
will itself fall into disarray if there is substantial disagreement about
what is the Gospel. I want to recommend that all of us here for this conference,
pastors and laity alike, try our hand [or should I say try our tongue]
at saying what the Gospel is. To put it strongly for emphasis sake: it
is the Gospel that ought to be guiding our reading of the Bible rather
than our assumption that the Bible is what we must first ‘believe
in’ and then we can find the Gospel in the Bible.
6. Here is my try at formulating the Gospel—as
the Gospel of Jesus Christ—as a way of clarifying for us
what is involved in that spiritual formation that is summoned and formed
by the Gospel:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News
that the God of Israel, the Creator of all creatures,
has in freedom and love become incarnate
in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
to enact and reveal God’s gracious reconciliation
of humanity to Godself, and
through the Holy Spirit calls and empowers human beings
to participate in God’s liberative and redemptive work by
acknowledging God’s gracious forgiveness in Jesus,
repenting of human sin,
receiving the gift of freedom, and
embracing authentic community by
loving the neighbor and the enemy,
caring for the whole creation, and
hoping for the final triumph of God’s grace
as the triune Ultimate Companion of all Creatures.
I hope it is discernible that this Gospel statement is meaningless apart
from the rich biblically-formed and tradition-sustained discourses and
practices of the church. But I believe this statement might also give
us some understanding of what sort of spiritual formation is important
for the life of the church.
7. These points can position us to grasp an essential
truth about faith and spiritual development: it is impossible—even
unintelligible—that anyone can become a Christian without learning
how to be a Christian and such learning is dependent on being formed
by the distinctive discourses and practices of the church.
It is this learning how that we can also call being spiritually
formed by and conformed to Christ. The Christian life itself is simply
the life of this being formed and conformed. To grow in spiritual life
it is necessary to acquire the skills involved in thinking and
practicing faithfulness. In learning these skills the Christian becomes
wise in the ways of God.
If this sounds odd to us, let me put it another way: however intense an
experience of some sort a person might have had, without awareness of
some available Christian language, it would be strictly impossible that
the person could understand her experience as an experience of the Holy
Spirit of the risen Jesus Christ. Certainly one might later learn
to construe a previously compelling experience as an experience of the
Spirit of God, but this construal is itself dependent on the language
the person has come to possess. Could Paul have recognized Jesus on the
road to Damascus if he had never heard of Jesus nor heard any language
about Jesus of Nazareth?
8. Central to this spiritual formation is that persons
come to have an identity before God. It is an identity that is
superior to any other identity the person might also have. This is the
identity of knowing oneself loved and forgiven by God and called by God
to life in and through the church as witness to God’s grace. The
practice of baptism both bestows this identity and signals the acceptance
of that identity by the baptizee and her promise to grow more deeply into
that identity in the unfolding future.[6]
9. In light of these points, I trust it is now obvious
why I firmly believe that the church as the body of Christ is intrinsically
an alternative community from the communities of the world and
yet that sort of alternative that lives on behalf of the world. It lives
on behalf of the world, yet not on the world’s terms. Rather, the
church lives on its own evangelical terms as a redemptive community summoned
by God to witness to God’s gracious Life for the redemption of the
world.
10. Two further points follow from these. First point:
the church is itself the site where the conversation occurs as
to what are the distinctive and important beliefs of the faith. Accordingly,
that conversation is joyfully theological and involves that struggle
whereby the church and all its members are engaged in that inescapable
movement of faith seeking understanding. Second point: when that
conversation internal to the church falls into disarray and confusion
or becomes captive to concepts and beliefs alien to the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, then the spiritual formation of its members becomes confused and
disordered.
11. If what I have just outlined is helpful in thinking
about spiritual formation and Christian discourses, then I hope we can
now discern that the theological content of the discourses and
practices of the church are truly important. It really does matter, then,
how those discourses construe who God is and what it means to be human.
Hence, we are confronted with the obvious implication that not everything
anyone in the church, whether minister or layperson, says is good and
truthful theology—that is, good and truthful construal of who the
God is who comes to us in Israel, becomes incarnate in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the Holy Spirit summons
us to life in the church. Professed earnest intentions to speak of God
do not of themselves guarantee truthful theological construals. Further,
simple citations of the Bible do not guarantee faithful and truthful construals.
Before going further with this inquiry and before you get too nervous
as to where I am going with these points, trust that I believe the God
we know in Jesus Christ through the Spirit is the One who can work with
and through broken and misleading and unfruitful discourses and practices.
Many are we who were moved by the Spirit through language that we no longer
believe is either true or upbuilding but was nevertheless the grist by
way of which the Spirit moved us to greater maturity and spirituality.
But that is no reason to be complacent about those discourses and practices
in the church that are broken and unhelpful or even false and unfaithful.
As Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought
like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an
end to childish ways.” [1 Cor 13.11]
Christian Identity, Spiritual Malformation, and the Discourses
of the Church
If spiritual formation, as I have been arguing, is itself dependent on
some discourses and practices that claim to be Christian, isn’t
it also the case that sometimes persons even in the church are malformed
by discourses and practices that might seem to be heretical? The concept
of spiritual formation thus contains within itself its contrary: spiritual
malformation. I worry—and I confess this must sound arrogant—that
many are the folk in our time who are being seriously malformed spiritually
by discourses and practices within the church that are simply false or
in contradiction to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
We all know that it is exceedingly demanding to be an alternative
community called and formed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Why is
it so demanding and troubling? How does it come about that the church
itself repeatedly succumbs to being just another mirror image of the world
in which it exists? It is a continuing circumstance of the church that
it is always and everywhere a community that exists in the midst of some
other world/culture/society in whatever place or whenever time. All
these other cultures/societies have their own principalities and powers
that organize their life together, or strenuously try to organize their
life. Repeatedly, however, it is these principalities and powers
that exert continual pressure to form persons and to tell them
who they are and what they are worth and what their place is in the larger
order. In short, the worldly powers intend to give persons an identity
that will inculcate loyalty to the powers and to living on behalf of the
powers. These powers want their subjects to answer, ‘I am an Oklahoman’
or ‘I am an American’ or ‘I am a German’ or ‘I
am a Democrat’ or ‘I am a Republican’, for example,
as the decisive markers of a person’s self-understanding and
worldly identity. In ways exceedingly complex, these powers are unceasingly
intent on subverting the church as an alternative community and are unceasingly
intent on assuring that the church will be a community that serves the
interests of the ruling powers of the world. It takes no imagination for
each of us to fill in the blanks here. [7]
The church, then, in its discourses and practices of spiritual formation
is continually tempted by these seductions and the history of such seducery
is long and distressing. Ask this question of our tradition today here
in the USA: am I an American who happens to be a Christian, or am I a
Christian who happens to be an American? Which identity orders which?
That is the disarming and crucial question. It should be apparent to us
that the church must maintain a vigorous self-critical dialogue within
itself if it is to sustain its identity as the body of Christ and an alternative
community to the world.
I would here call your attention to a wonderfully insightful book by one
of our distinguished lecturers here, namely, Professor Philip Kenneson’s
Life on the Vine: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit in Christian
Community.[8] His book is a precise and subtle diagnosis and exploration
of the many obstacles to Christian spiritual formation in our present
American culture. The mirror he holds up to us in the Movement is a mirror
that brings to light our hidden beliefs and inclinations and enjoins us
to cultivate a distinctive way of life in the church of Jesus Christ.
Many are the ways in which the church’s discourses and practices
have been malformed by the powerful influences of the world, and we might
also infer that such malformation has infiltrated and often confused the
spiritual life of the members of the church body.
If we are in any doubt about the perils to which I am referring and about
the ways in which appeals to an inerrant Bible have succumbed to these
perils, then consider how many brutal wars and battles have been fought
defending the belief in the divine authority of kings—an authority
repeatedly defended as grounded in the biblical language of kingship or
the unrivaled and God-ordained authority of rulers. Yet today, the question
of the authority of kings as representatives of divine rule and judgment
simply does not arise. It is not a live question. Why was it a live and
therefore deadly question for millions of folk over many centuries? How
did it happen that seemingly sincere Christians construed their primary
discourses as counseling them to be obedient to and defend the rightful
authority of kings and other rulers? And to kill on behalf of the king
and the maintenance of the king’s realm?[9]
Consider the status of chattel slavery. It was for centuries defended
by many Christians as directly authorized by the Bible or at least permitted
by biblical teaching and practice. And many were they who suffered as
slaves and many were they who died to defeat slavery and died to defend
slavery. There was the Bible—God’s Word—being read in
such different ways. Is there any one here today who would like to defend
the right to buy, possess, and sell human beings as slaves? Let us hope
it is a non-issue for Stone-Campbell Christians today.[10]
Rising beyond issues of kingships and slavery, consider the overwhelming
fact of history that Christians have for centuries gone to war when rulers
determined it was necessary to go to war. Surely the Christians knew that
there was not a scintilla of evidence anywhere in the NT that Jesus called
followers to kill in his name or for the sake of his Kingdom. Nor does
the NT anywhere teach that it is morally necessary and obligatory to kill
others in order to defend the boundaries of a nation or a people. In fact
the preaching of Jesus was replete with commands about loving and praying
for the enemy and turning the cheek. How then does it happen that persons
in the church become spiritually formed to think that killing others is
somehow warranted by the one they call their Savior?
Let all of us affirm that it does really matter who we think God is,
how we identify the reality and activities of God. The word “God’
gets used in many different ways in the English language and in other
languages as well. For Christians the crucial question is what do we mean
when we use the word “God’. Are we referring to that terrible
god vowing to destroy and burn this fallen world and to rejoice in the
suffering of the condemned? Are we referring to the god who demands loyalty
to the state from all the citizens of each of the nation-states in our
time? Which of these gods is the One who comes to us in Christ Jesus?
Friends in Christ, I am affirming that, if the discourses of the
church are crucial to the spiritual formation of its members, then it
matters what the contents of those discourses are—it matters what
we believe and say about God and human life and the Gospel of Jesus Christ—and
it matters to how we live and are formed as the body of Christ. It matters
to whether we serve and are inspired by the Holy Spirit or by some other
animating spirit.
Some Discourses and Practices that Involve Spiritual Perils
While many in our tradition have believed that theologizing is itself
inimical to the faith, that belief itself has the consequence of hiding
from ourselves that we hold deep beliefs about God that are formed by
no other source than prejudiced kinfolk or a twisted and untutored pastor
or a civic organization we might have joined or by a television evangelist
we find congenial to our tastes or what we might have thought up in our
own kitchen.
Consider now these beliefs quite common among the folk I encounter in
church on Sunday mornings and in their crises around death and suffering.
Many believe that everything that happens in the world is directly willed
by God and that every event bears a particular divine purpose. So, if
one loses one’s child in an automobile accident, then God must have
had a purpose in willing that accident to happen—though it remains
hidden from us that if that is so, then we cannot really call it an ‘accident’;
it was a necessity willed by God. So we are utterly bewildered by the
loss of the child and are perhaps rightly angry with God as to why God
willed this to happen. Had we more time we could explore the nuances in
this line of reasoning, but you would be foolish to suppose that this
belief that everything happens for a divine purpose is not formative for
many a Christian. I want to suggest to you that this belief really matters
in how persons construe their lives, but I propose to you that it is profoundly
misleading about the God we know in the cross of Jesus Christ. Perhaps
we should phrase the matter this way: God does create and sustain a world
of creatures in continual interaction with each other and therewith permits
many destructive events to occur, while continually working in the world
to be bring good out of evil.[11]
Think further about how persons often construe praying—sometimes
under the impetus of questionable construals of NT accounts of Jesus’
preaching and teaching.[12] It goes something like this: God is eager
to reward those who trust in God and will give to the faithful whatever
the faithful ask in prayer, if they just have enough faith. Hence,
hunker down and have enough faith and God will give you what you want.
Prayer gets you what you want. God the Cosmic Fetcher doing what the faithful
want! And, when the person who so prays does not get that for which she
prayed, then the obvious conclusion is that she did not have enough faith.
Consider what this means for persons who pray for the recovery of their
dying loved ones who yet go on and die in spite of the prayers. What confusion
and bewilderment: did the loved one die because we did not pray with enough
faith? Perhaps it would have gone better and the loved one escaped death
if we had gotten a hundred earnest persons praying? So, God awaits to
be persuaded [bribed?] by the prayers of the faithful but the persuasion
does not work if there is not the requisite amount of faith? Who is this
‘God’ anyhow? How much more devastating can life be than to
lead the sick and dying to believe that if they just have enough faith
then God will cure them? So now these presumably Christian beliefs and
practices spiritually form the dying to bear the additional guilt that
they are dying because they did not have enough faith?
How do beliefs like these get such a hold on us? Why did we miss that
Jesus’ interest was teaching us that God is indeed gracious toward
us and eager to bestow blessings on us. But we will only understand what
the requisite blessings are when we understand that Jesus is teaching
us what we ought to desire if we intend our desires to be commensurate
with the Kingdom he is preaching and bringing. Pray for these blessings
and God will surely be gracious. Pray for the blessing of being one who
hungers and thirsts for righteousness sake. Pray for the blessing of being
a peacemaker. How generous God is to peacemakers. Pray for the blessing
of a pure heart and be blessed in seeing God deeply. Pray for those who
revile and persecute you, those enemies that intend you harm, and you
will be blessed. The world may not bless you with honor and esteem, but
God will.
Friends, I am not calling into question our praying those intercessory
prayers that are vital to our faith. But I do worry about the deep corruption
involved in the beliefs and practices of supposing we can pray to God
to give us what we want and never question whether our wants and desires
are appropriate to the presence of the Kingdom. What passes today under
the slogan of the ‘Gospel of Wealth’ is an heretical encouragement
to use the practice and discourses of prayer as a means to the really
important ‘blessing’ of being wealthy. Why is it that we forget
to pray for those goods that Jesus taught us to desire or to pray as Paul
did that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s”
[Rom 14.8]?
Yes, people in the church use the Bible in debilitating ways. I once heard
a sermon based on Psalm 91 urging us to believe that this Psalm was the
soldiers’ prayer that God will protect them from the enemy, instilling
the belief that if a soldier truly trusts in God he will be brought safely
home, for God always protects the truly faithful. In that perfunctory
greeting line after the sermon, I asked the preacher whether he was aware
that precisely this Psalm had been cited by many of the Jewish faithful
as the compelling reason why Jesus could not have been the Messiah. How
could anyone be construed as the Messiah of God, the one most blessed,
if he had been crucified and killed by the enemy? Surely a true Messiah
would have been saved by the God of Israel from death and harm at the
hands of the enemy. The pastor looked at me as though I was a quarrelsome
professor picking on a sincere preacher just doing his duty of proclaiming
God’s word. Friends, this is the stuff of spiritual formation and
malformation. Persons in the church are often being formed by just these
beliefs and just these practices. It is sobering and counter-cultural
to think people in the church should be formed in faith by believing in
a God who dies on a cross for the salvation of the world. That is odd,
very odd, and we dare not forget just how odd that story is and how the
Gospel is tethered to it—and how the church’s soul depends
on its being tethered to that crucifixion and that salvation.
Friends, it matters what you believe about God. It matters to your own
spiritual formation whether you believe God’s aim for the world
is ultimate destruction of the many and salvation for the few. It matters
whether you believe God called America to be a light to the nations and
therefore America is always justified in the purity of its motives and
its own going-to-war against enemies as the enemies of God. It matters
whether you believe Muslims are included in that category of the neighbors
and strangers we are to love.
Think about it. It may be that our spirituality is at stake in what we
believe or do not believe. It matters whether we are formed in Christ
or malformed by the spirits of the world.
Endnotes
1. Some folk may be interested in seeing an exchange between
Kent and myself that is posted on my web site, www.grammaroffaith.com,
under “Responses” in the menu.
2. In another format I recently addressed issues of ecclesiology with
others in the Stone-Campbell Movement in an essay entitled “On Being
the Church of Jesus Christ” in Leaven, vol. 15, no. 1 (First
Quarter 2007), pp. 6-11.
3. That some folk in the Movement nevertheless thought they were just
interpreting the facts of Scripture in a manner of ‘inductive
reasoning’, see Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions
of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of
the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), especially pp.
96-98. For the reader/listener who is interested in further exploration
on various theological topics, I will refer them to my systematic theology,
A Grammar of Christian Faith: Systematic Explorations in Christian
Life and Doctrine, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002), hereinafter referred to as GCF. See GCF, 117-119 for a discussion
of ‘reason’. See GCF, 121-130 for a discussion of the authority
of Scripture, and 131-135 for a discussion of ‘tradition’.
4. I grant that it may seem peculiar to put this emphasis on language
and discourse, but see my prolonged discussion of these concepts in GCF,
1-19.
5. I think one of the reasons the Stone-Campbell Movement in all of its
strands has been short on developing a doctrine of the work of the Holy
Spirit is that we have hesitated at the development of a robust trinitarian
doctrine of God. See GCF, 483-509, for an attempt at retrieving such a
robust doctrine of the Spirit. Note as well how trinitarian conceptuality
connects spirituality, Christian life, and the church in GCF, 511-591,
593-653.
6. See GCF, 662-670 for what my Disciples friends think is a surprising
defense of the Movement’s emphasis on ‘believer’s baptism’.
7. See GCF, 47-52, 648-653 for a discussion of what I call ‘the
dialectic between church and world’, in terms of which I explain
three interrelated uses of the term ‘world’.
8. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999.
9. Of course, Paul in Romans 13.1-7 is typically invoked in these matters,
almost in utter disregard for everything else he says in this epistle.
I will say here, though I recognize its insufficiency, that sorting through
these issues of ‘government’ and ‘politics’ is
a major project for my future work.
10. Anyone who is tempted to think of herself as affirming biblical inerrancy
must read the sobering account by the church historian Mark Noll of the
terrible infelicities embedded in the church’s discussion of slavery
because of some biblical passages that seemed to permit slavery. See Noll’s
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006). Does anyone here today doubt that the
ghosts of those debates and that war are hovering around us still?
11. See further the lengthy discussion in Chapter Five: God the Creator:
Creation, Providence, and Evil in GCF, 233-292.
12. I have in mind such passages as Mk 11.22-24; Mt 7.7-11; 21.21-22.
But see how Luke changes the meaning in Lk 11.13. See my extended discussion
of prayer in GCF, 676-688.
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