Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future

Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community

Steven R. Harmon

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781481305822
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

Baptists tend to be the "problem children" of the ecumenical movement. The Baptist obsession to realize a true church birthed a tradition of separation. While Baptists' misgivings about ecumenism may stem from this fissiparous genealogy, it is equally true that the modern ecumenical movement itself increasingly lacks consensus about the pathway to a visible Christian unity.In Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future, Steven R. Harmon explores the relationship of the Baptist calling to be a pilgrim community and the ecumenical movement. Harmon argues that neither vision can be fulfilled apart from a mutually receptive ecumenical engagement. As Harmon shows, Baptist communities and the churches from which they are separated need one another. Chief among the gifts Baptists have to offer the rest of the church are their pilgrim aversion to overly realized eschatologies of the church and their radical commitment to discerning the rule of Christ by means of the Scriptures. Baptists, in turn, must be willing to receive from other churches neglected aspects of the radical catholicity from which the Bible is inseparable.Embedded in the Baptist vision and its historical embodiment are surprising openings for ecumenical convergence. Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future urges Baptists and their dialogue partners to recognize and embrace these ecumenically oriented facets of Baptist identity as indispensable provisions for their shared pilgrimage toward the fullness of the rule of Christ in their midst, which remains partial so long as Christ's body remains divided.

Part I

The Baptist Vision and the Ecumenical Moment

1

A Radical Baptist Proposal

In December 2010 a joint international commission of the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church met in Oxford, the “city of dreaming spires,” to envision the ecumenical future and how their communions might take concrete steps toward inhabiting it together. It was not the first time representatives of these seemingly polar opposite Christian traditions had engaged in this sort of ecumenical encounter. The Oxford conversations were the fifth installment of a five-year series of talks between the two communions held from 2006 through 2010, which resumed the work of an earlier series of international Baptist–Catholic conversations that took place from 1984 through 1988.1 Many Baptists have applauded these steps toward greater expressions of unity between Baptist churches and the Catholic Church, and the community of global Baptists as represented by the General Council of the Baptist World Alliance voted to receive the reports from both series of conversations at their gatherings in 1989 and 2013. Leaders of some Latin American Baptist unions affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance, however, had expressed grave concerns about the first series of conversations when they were proposed, and again in response to the presentation and adoption of the report from the dialogue.2 Therefore, great pains were taken in the planning of the second series of conversations to assure the global Baptist community that these concerns had been heard and would be addressed in the upcoming dialogue.3

In Oxford the members of the Baptist and Catholic delegations devoted a week to drafting the final report of their conversations on the theme “The Word of God in the Life of the Church” in a setting suggestive of just how far ecumenical relations have progressed in some ecclesial locales. In the neighborhood of multiple markers commemorating the martyrdoms Protestants and Catholics inflicted on one another during the sixteenth century, the joint commission had lodging, meals, morning and evening prayer, and working sessions at Regent’s Park College. Regent’s Park is a Baptist-founded “Permanent Private Hall” of the University of Oxford that owes its beginnings to the fact that students who were not members of the Church of England were excluded from admission to the major British universities until the 1870s (an experience shared by Baptists and Catholics in England, it is worth noting). Nestled between the Catholic private halls St. Benet’s Hall and Blackfriars Hall along St. Giles’, Regent’s Park enjoys warm collegial relations with these Catholic neighbors. When Greyfriars Hall, another Catholic private hall at Oxford, was closed in 2007, Regent’s Park accepted the remaining Greyfriars students and began hosting Mass in its chapel to provide for their spiritual needs. The faculty and student makeup of the college is ecumenical, and members of the teaching staff are full members of the thoroughly ecumenical University of Oxford faculty. In a place where Baptists, Catholics, Anglicans, and other Christians now comfortably enjoy such forms of academic and ecclesial mutual acceptance, one might be tempted to think that while ecumenical dialogues are in principle a good thing, the divisions they address are no longer painful and therefore not pressing. The church is already catholic in the sense that its multiple communions belong to the whole church and, for the most part, recognize one another as such.

Catholicity beyond the (Invisible) Universal Church

My book Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision appeared in print five months before the joint commission for the second series of Baptist–Catholic conversations convened at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School in December 2006.4 Soon after the penultimate meeting of the joint commission in Rome in December 2009, the journal Pro Ecclesia sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology published a book symposium on Towards Baptist Catholicity featuring four articles reviewing the book by Catholic theologians Nicholas Healy and Maureen O’Connell and Baptist theologians Richard Crane and Elizabeth Newman, along with an author’s response.5 The Pro Ecclesia reviewers accurately discerned my intentions in writing Towards Baptist Catholicity as well as the rhetorical strategies I employed in its writing, often grasping just what it was that I was attempting to do better than I did when I was trying to do it. Their insightful responses prodded me to address more fully two questions raised by the book’s arguments: Precisely why should Baptists embrace catholicity as essential to their identity? And by what authority would they do so?

If the catholicity of the church merely refers to the wholeness of its inclusion of all who belong to Christ, the book’s title might suggest that Baptists still had a long way to go before they could recognize many others who claimed the name of Christ as truly belonging to his church. Perhaps recognition of other communities as “church” is in fact an ecumenical step that remains future for many Baptists. Towards Baptist Catholicity instead defined the catholicity toward which Baptists should move in a way that includes and builds upon historic Baptist affirmations of the church as catholic yet envisions a thicker sense of catholicity than they had in mind. Though of course there are many exceptions whenever one generalizes about Baptists, most Baptists would have no quibble with a quantitative understanding of the catholicity of the church, according to which there is a universal church to which all believers belong and which transcends visible local congregations. It is explicitly affirmed in the two most significant Baptist confessions from the seventeenth century. According to the Particular Baptist Second London Confession published in 1689, “The Catholick or universal Church, which (with respect to internal work of the Spirit, and truth of grace) may be called invisible, consists of the whole number of the Elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof.”6 Likewise, the 1678 General Baptist confession called the Orthodox Creed appropriated three of the four classic “marks of the church” from the Nicene Creed, confessing in article 29 that “there is one holy catholick church, consisting of, or made up of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered, in one body under Christ, the only head thereof,” and in article 30, “. . . we believe the visible church of Christ on earth, is made up of several distinct congregations, which make up that one catholick church, or mystical body of Christ.”7 Thus Judge Willis, President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, was able to invoke both the language of the ancient creeds and the Baptist confessional heritage in his “Address of Welcome” to the first Baptist World Congress in London in 1905 when he insisted, “We believe, and our fathers have believed, in the Holy Catholic Church”—an affirmation of Baptist catholicity that he seems to have intended quantitatively.8

But beyond this quantitative recognition that Baptists belong to the whole church and the whole church belongs to Baptists, catholicity also entails a “pattern of faith and practice that distinguished early catholic Christianity from Gnosticism, Arianism, Donatism, and all manner of other heresies and schisms” and is therefore “a qualitative fullness of faith and order that is visibly expressed in one eucharistic fellowship.”9 Baptists need this sort of catholicity first and foremost because it will help their churches form more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.10 To the degree that Baptist communities identify themselves as other than catholic in this qualitative sense, they are forming their members in a quasi-Gnostic pattern of faith and practice that is perilously close to being sub-Christian.11 Baptists need a more qualitative catholicity for the sake of their own spiritual health. Even among Baptists who gladly declare their ecumenical openness to other Christians and their churches and thus are quantitatively catholic in their ecclesial outlook, there is much room remaining for progress toward a more fully qualitative Baptist catholicity.12

Catholicity and the Ecumenical Future

Yet as Richard Crane correctly observed in his review of Towards Baptist Catholicity, an improved state of Baptist ecclesial existence would be a penultimate end of the book’s proposals. Crane asked, “Is ‘Baptist Catholicity’ the ultimate goal of ‘Baptist catholicity’?”13 If Baptist Catholicity (uppercase “C”) means an entry of Baptists into communion with the bishop of Rome, then in a qualified sense Baptist catholicity (lowercase “c”) does indeed have Baptist Catholicity (uppercase “C”) as its goal. By the time I had written the concluding chapter of the book, I had come to the realization that what I was proposing was not only a program for the renewal of the Baptist tradition through retrieval of the larger tradition from which Baptists have become largely disconnected (though it was certainly that). I now regarded the proposed catholic renewal of Baptist life as necessary to the movement of the whole church toward the ecumenical future, and therefore I concluded the book with the “hope that all involved in the conversation [about the relation of the Baptist vision to the ancient tradition that Baptists share, or ought to share, with the rest of the church] will love Christ’s church deeply enough to regard our cherished constructions of Baptist identity as temporary way stations en route to the realization of the visible unity of the body of Christ in one eucharistic fellowship.”14 My participation in the Baptist–Catholic joint commission over the next five years only strengthened the conviction that “Baptist catholicity” ultimately has to do with the ecumenical goal of the visible unity of the church.

While Baptists can easily point to aspects of the current faith and practice of the Catholic Church and other Christian communions as grounds for rejecting such a goal, Baptists are not responsible for the reformation of Catholic magisterial teaching or the transformation of that which they find objectionable in other churches. But Baptists can address the insufficiently catholic character of their own communities. The earliest description of the church as “catholic” by Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Smyrneans not long after the New Testament Christianity that Baptists have endeavored to restore,15 points to four marks of a qualitative catholicity in contrast to the faith and practice of the Docetists: a robustly incarnational Christology, sacramental realism, visible unity, and the ministry of oversight.16 Apart from christological and trinitarian orthodoxy (and there have been shortcomings even at that point),17 the Baptist pattern of being church has not typified this ancient configuration of catholicity. These deficiencies in catholicity are chief among the multiple factors that in Catholic perspective would preclude the communion of Baptist communities with the bishop of Rome. Baptists cannot by themselves do everything that would be necessary for the realization of full communion between their churches and those now in communion with Rome, but they can patiently work for the catholicization of Baptist faith and practice. Progress in heeding the ecumenical imperative of visible Christian unity disclosed in Jesus’ prayer in John 17 depends in part on a Baptist embrace of the radically catholic core of the Christian faith.

How might this happen? Towards Baptist Catholicity emphasized the role of Baptist theological educators who might succeed in forming a more catholic vision of Baptist life in a new generation of ministers, who would then slowly lead their congregations toward more fully catholic patterns of faith and practice with much patience and pastoral sensitivity. But as Newman noted in her symposium review, this remains for now an academic exercise—at least as far as Baptists in the United States are concerned.18 Many Baptist communities in Europe have maintained greater degrees of continuity with the more catholic ecclesial outlook that once prevailed among the earliest Baptists in the seventeenth century,19 and the Baptist World Alliance is giving renewed attention to the connectional and ecumenical dimensions of ecclesiology in meetings of its Commission on Doctrine and Christian Unity and other conferences.20 Part of the “how?” of Baptist catholicity may be bringing more Baptists in the United States into these global Baptist conversations that are open to a more catholic orientation to Baptist ecclesiology.

Catholicity and Authority

But the practical question of how Baptists might become more fully catholic merely hints at a much more crucial and infinitely more problematic question: what would authorize a catholic pattern of Baptist faith and practice? In other words, where is the magisterium that could reliably guide Baptists toward catholicity? Towards Baptist Catholicity dodged this question, partly because its rhetorical goal was to convince theologically educated Baptists that their communities need a fuller catholicity and that there are precedents within the Baptist tradition itself for a more catholic vision of Baptist identity than currently prevails, and partly because I was not yet satisfied with my own provisional answers to it. The book’s MacIntyrean construal of the authority of tradition as the authority of the communio sanctorum in its contestation of the tradition could be read as an argument for a “magisterium of the whole.”21 In such a pan-ecclesial construct of the location of the church’s teaching authority, the voices that arise from what Nicholas Healy in his Pro Ecclesia review appreciatively identified as “Baptist individualism” would be heard and weighed along with other ecclesial voices.22 But without greater specificity in its location of ecclesial authority, the theory lacks adequate safeguards against the very thing it seeks to avoid: self-chosen patterns of faith and practice by independent individuals and autonomous congregations in the configuration of a “selective catholicity” that, as Paul Avis perceptively pointed out in the book’s foreword, embraces certain ancient marks of catholicity but ignores the episcopal office and its historical role as the ecclesial location of teaching authority that authorizes the other marks of catholicity.23

I am told that some non-Baptists who have taken note of the small but growing number of publications by Baptist theologians who advocate a more catholic identity for Baptists24 are concerned about the dangers of eclecticism inherent in such an enterprise. I share these concerns. Many Baptist readers of Towards Baptist Catholicity have told me that they especially appreciated chapter 8, which urges the Baptist retrieval of catholic practices of corporate worship that include celebration of the full Christian year, use of the common lectionary, more frequent eucharistic celebration, confession of the ancient creeds, the use of patrist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. The Baptist Vision and the Ecumenical Moment
• Part II. Baptists, Biblicism, and Catholicity
• Part III. Baptist Identity and Receptive Ecumenism
• Part IV. Baptist Theology and the Ecumenical Future
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Scripture Index
• Author and Editor Index
• Subject Index
• Notes