Baptists and the Catholic Tradition

Reimagining the Church's Witness in the Modern World

Harvey, Barry

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493422227
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Barry Harvey provides a doctrine of the church that combines Baptist distinctives and origins with an unbending commitment to the visible church as the social body of Christ. Speaking to the broader Christian community, Harvey updates, streamlines, and recontextualizes the arguments he made in an earlier edition of this book ( Can These Bones Live? ). This new edition offers a style of ecclesial witness that can help Christian churches engage culture. The author suggests new ways Baptists can engage ecumenically with Catholics and other Protestants, offers insights for Christian worship and practice, and shows how the fragmented body of Christ can be re-membered after Christendom.

1
Where, Then, Do We Stand?

The Church as the Presupposition of Theology

Theology is a laborious attempt to explain the joke about this ordinary physical, political world.

Herbert McCabe, God Matters

The desire to ask about the beginning, writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is the innermost passion of our thinking as creaturely beings, imparting reality to every genuine question we ask. And yet no sooner is the question of the beginning put before us than our thinking is thrown back on itself, spending its strength like huge breakers crashing upon a rocky shore. In its desire to reach back to the beginning, human reasoning cannot help but pound itself to pieces. We are intractably located in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning.1

In contrast to the delusion that there is a Gnostic “spark of breath” in each of us going back “to before the Creation,”2 we always find ourselves somewhere, heirs to patterns of speaking and acting set within a context formed by the time, place, and people of which we are a part. Indeed, if others are to take what we say or do seriously, we must take up and consistently maintain some standpoint, and they must do likewise,3 for it is only in and through some particular stance that “the world and ourselves are opened to us.”4 The theological task facing the church, then, is not to try to find a universal starting point or method that can lift us out of our time and place so that we might see all the kingdoms of the world as though we were gods. It is instead to help a fallen world take its bearings here in the middle, to understand something of what went before, to learn about the way things developed in the past that led to the way they are now. Instead of asking where sound theology begins, those who would practice the art of pilgrimage would do well to ask, “Where, then, do we stand?”5

This question can, of course, be parsed in several different ways. It can be taken in an epistemic sense: What are the warrants for our claims to know something significant about ourselves? It also suggests a historical referent: it has been a commonplace for a time now to say that we live in a “postmodern” era, though increasingly it is far from certain what is meant by that notion. This question can also be addressed by noting that much of the inhabited world, both human and nonhuman, now works, consumes, lives, and dies within a neoliberal6 matrix of nation-state, market, and cultural ethos in which every person, thing, product, and activity that we might have once said was good, true, and beautiful is now evaluated as a formal value predicated on its usefulness and exchange potential, thus “flattening all hierarchies to formal equivalences.”7

Though these are important considerations that I take up in what follows, for Christians the question of where we now stand is principally set within an eschatological trajectory narrated by the apocalyptic images and motifs of the New Testament. As citizens of another city that is to come (Heb. 13:14), we have no permanent standpoint or proper place in the present time. We are on pilgrimage through history, looking with anticipation for the coming of the commonwealth whose architect and builder is the triune God (Heb. 11:10; cf. Phil. 3:20). When we ask where we now stand, we do so as a people seeking to go on and go further toward that future that summons all of God’s creatures, and especially humankind. In this regard Bonhoeffer rightly states that the visible church is the presupposition for theology.8

I need to add a word of caution at this point, one that I presuppose about the church throughout this work. Though I believe that this motley mob of misfits and malcontents is a reality of revelation established and animated by the missions of the triune God, it is never so in a straightforward and unambiguous sense. It is, has always been, and will remain until the final consummation a “sesquiguous” reality,9 both (1) a social order set apart by the Spirit to embody concretely the presence and activity of the crucified and risen Christ before a hurting and waiting world and (2) an impure and sinful community constantly in need of the grace and forgiveness it proclaims. In no wise am I arguing that the empirical church possesses the reality of the new humanity in Christ or has decisively left behind humankind’s “Adamic” past, but in faith it sesquiguously embodies habits and relations of the new human in tension with that past.10

I thus contend that the church, by being what in the power of the Holy Spirit it is—the earthly-historical body of Christ—constitutes an interpretive surmise about creaturely life as lived before God and the world, and is that not just for itself but for the whole cosmos. The existence of this people is grounded in a distinctive performance of life and language that is a socially embodied, historically extended interpretation of the world in general and of human life in particular. The answer to the question of what is signified by the word God cannot be adequately ascertained by the kind of conceptual clarification practiced by analytic philosophers (though that might be helpful at certain points), but only by observing how this community orders its life together through its worship, teaching, witness, and work.11 This hermeneutical dimension is implicit in the understanding of the church as a sacrament—that is, as “a sign and instrument . . . of communion with God and of unity among men.”12

Another way to put this is to say with John Milbank that theology can be practiced only by way of explicating Christian practice: “The Christian God can no longer be thought of as a God first seen, but rather as a God first prayed to, first imagined, first inspiring certain actions, first put into words, and always already thought about, objectified, even if this objectification is recognised as inevitably inadequate.”13 This interdependence of theory with practice is not unique to theology, for any attempt at interpretation or explanation is an unpacking of already existing activities.

This book is therefore an exercise in theological hermeneutics, though not in the narrow sense of formulating a general theory of meaning that establishes normative rules, procedures, and standards for the interpretation of written texts. It has to do instead with the possibilities of human action, fulfillment, and happiness made possible by what God accomplishes in our midst, encompassing ethics, politics, poetics, rhetoric, cosmology, and metaphysics. Theology has a vested interest in all these areas of investigation, but it attends to them in the course of asking how to carry on with a specified message at that point in life “where past hearing turns to new speaking.”14

Theological hermeneutics asks, What do the life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth and the sending of the Holy Spirit have to do with this life that we now live? If we are to grasp the significance of Christ and his earthly-historical body for our lives, living as we do in a different time and place, in circumstances that are marked by their own particularity and contingency, it is necessary that we learn how to narrate our lives both as distinct from his story and, at the same time, as a continuation of it. To this end theologians engage in three interpretive tasks, involving, first, the Scriptures as the book of the church; second, the practices of the church; and third, the political and economic regime, cultural ethos, and forms of knowledge that distinguish our particular time and place in history.

Theology’s “venture of an overall view”15 subsists in the doctrinal, liturgical, and spiritual convictions and in moral dispositions and activities that have been handed on to us within the Christian community by our mothers and fathers in the faith. We take up and develop this heritage so that we might learn how to speak truthfully and live faithfully in our own circumstances and then hand it on in good working order to our spiritual offspring. This book is therefore also a work in ecclesiology, with emphases, first, on the originating mission and character of the church and its subsequent history, and second, on three of the constitutive practices of the church: baptism and Eucharist and spiritual formation. These practices cultivate the mission and sustain the distinctive form of life that characterizes the body of Christ in the world, which is the topic of the last chapter.

Any attempt at theological hermeneutics grounded in the life and language of the church immediately encounters a serious problem in the fact of the dismembered body of Christ. Given that the visible church is the presupposition of this hermeneutics, these divisions may make theology as a public endeavor virtually impossible, since the proper agent of such hermeneutics does not exist, unless one simply declares that one particular branch totally comprehends that reality. The assumption that theology can flourish apart from some degree of unity in the church in actuality threatens to reduce theology’s teachings on matters of faith and practice to “the nonbinding character of a general moral exhortation.” When theology is deprived of its unified public character, we are left with little more than the private concerns of individual professors.16

If we are to go on and go further as the nomadic people of God in the context of a divided church (assuming it can happen at all), writes Robert Jenson, then we must confess that “we live in radical self-contradiction and that by every churchly act we contradict that contradiction. Also theology must make this double contradiction at and by every step of its way.”17 This need not be a pessimistic assessment, since the members of Christ’s body live by hope in the coming kingdom of God. And so we wait in the knowledge that it is a blessing to theology that we need not wait for the church to be completely re-membered to do our work.

Some may object that proceeding from the standpoint of the church community and its intellectual tradition entails suppressing the critical and speculative side of our rational nature, but these fears are unfounded. When inquiring after knowledge generally, writes John Henry Newman, “we must assume something to prove anything, and can gain nothing without a venture.”18 Human beings must make an interpretive surmise of one sort or another to know or do anything at all, fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Where, Then, Do We Stand?
• 2. Can These Bones Live?
• 3. Caught Up in the Apocalypse
• 4. Let Us Be like the Nations
• 5. Sacramental Sinews
• 6. Holy Vulnerable
• 7. Dwelling Again in Tents
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover