Being the Church

An Eastern Orthodox Understanding of Church Growth

Rommen

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498293167
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

If the divine liturgy really is as beautiful as we claim, wouldn't more people attend? Wouldn't the church grow? Driven by our desire for growth, we count, we analyze, we make charts, and we strategize, but often with few discernible results. That is probably the result of focusing on secondary aspects of church life. As we know, the very existence of a church is a gift of God's presence and not the result of any particular actions taken by human beings. For that reason, church is primarily about being something rather than doing or achieving something. So the growth of the church is not reflected in ever-increasing numbers, dollars, and activities, but rather in steadily growing conformity to the divine ideal. So in order to evaluate ecclesial growth, we will first have to ask what the church is supposed to be. One answer to that question is captured in the four marks of the church given in the creed: Oneness, Holiness, Catholicity, and Apostolicity. These four characteristics serve as a matrix or framework within which we can focus on the primary aspects of ecclesial being and help it grow and become what it was intended to be.

1

Ecclesial Being

On the Nature of the Church’s Existence

Creation ex nihilo implies that God created realities, which are outside of himself, and despite the fact that there is an “infinite” distance, or rather an ontological gulf (χάσμα) between the nature of God and that of created beings. God’s intention was not one of producing beings, which would have no participation in his glory.29

Introduction: Methodological Issues

In most cases, church growth thinkers simply assume the presence of Church by referring to every Christian group they study as a church. They rarely reflect on the nature of the Church, which is supposed to be actualized in those organizations. They seem to simply bracket the question of whether the particular organization being analyzed is or is not a Church. In many respects, this is a perfectly understandable move. For one thing, it fits the modern, post-Enlightenment insistence on avoiding the questions of being as such and working exclusively from that which we find to be existent—along the lines of the famous dictum “existence precedes essence.”30 The other thing is that, at least in North America, there are so many definitions of what a church is that a great deal of time and effort would be needed to sort them out. Craig Van Gelder, in his insightful book The Essence of the Church, points out that in one setting seven distinct definitions were offered: “a building, an event, a policy body, a relational group, an institutionalized denomination, an organizational style, and the practice of affirming correct confessional criteria.”31 So it would seem easier to simply accept these definitions as if each one carried “some truth about what we understand the church to be in North America”32 and move on to the more practical work of analysis. Of course, in bracketing the issue of ecclesial being, one accepts the mistaken idea that measuring a church’s countable attributes will tell us something reliable about its essence, whether it is a Church or not. One can certainly count membership and analyze its growth or decline. But what do such numbers actually tell us? Does an increase in membership necessarily indicate the presence of Church or point to its goodness and integrity? Consider the warning of St. Gregory the Theologian:

And where are those who reproach us for our poverty and are proud of their wealth? They consider great numbers of people to be a sign of the Church, and despise the small flock. They measure the Divinity and they weigh people. They place a high value on grains of sand and belittle the luminaries. They gather into their treasure-house simple stones, and disdain pearls.33

What I would like to do in this chapter is develop a theory of ecclesial being, i.e., an ontology of the Church that will serve as a framework for addressing these issues. I want to unbracket the idea of ecclesial being and ask a series of foundational questions that will provide a sure understanding of what the Church is and how it exists. In order to do that I will have to make use of not only biblical data, but also the dogmatic assertions made by the Church throughout its history. But that raises the question of just how we approach, interpret, and weight the theological statements and developments of the past. As I see it, there are two distinct ways of handling the data.

On the one hand, I can take an Enlightenment-driven individualistic approach in which I assume a certain independence from history, that is, the authority to personally interpret the historical data as I see fit, the right to criticize and even reject anything but contemporary sources, and to view any changes as perpetual progress traced forward to an uncritical acceptance of the most recent set of innovations. This is, as C. S. Lewis put it, “the curious modern assumption that all changes of belief, however brought about, are necessarily exempt from blame.”34

This approach is largely the result of the ways in which at least three Enlightenment characteristics have filtered down into contemporary thinking.35 First, there is the idea of individual freedom, in particular the freedom to use one’s own reason. Today this has taken the form of a universal right to choose what we believe according to our own reasoning and to have nothing imposed on us, that is, to divorce ourselves from the tutelage of the larger narrative of history. However, since every age makes mistakes or has blind spots, this approach exacerbates the errors of our own time and cuts us off from the process whereby ideas are “tested against the great body of Christian thought down through the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.”36

Second, there is the critical use of reason, which has been translated into the right to criticize anything and form one’s own, almost unassailable, opinion on just about everything. Of course, none of us can escape our own blindness, and

we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths, which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.37

Third, there is the notion of the relentless evolution of thought, which supposedly improves on what has been and causes the contemporary fascination with that which is new.38 This leads to the rejection, as a matter of principle, of arguments based on past practice or antiquity. It undermines the authority of ideas rooted in the historical narrative, such as biblical and Christian tradition, and affirms instead the thought of the contemporary moment. But as C. S Lewis insists, “the only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it), which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books.”39

In the place of this Enlightenment-driven individualistic approach, I propose taking a non-Enlightenment integral approach to ecclesiology, a methodology in which my opinions, interpretations of, and changes to the dogmatic assertions of the Church are regulated by the community that developed them and in which acceptable progress is viewed as faithful rearticulation of the prescriptions traced back to their origins, namely, to Christ and the apostles. By non-Enlightenment thinking I am not referring to a pre-Enlightenment or premodern framework, but rather to a frame of reference that, historically speaking, has not been captured or transformed by the Enlightenment. Here I am thinking of the theological and philosophical traditions of the Eastern Church.40 Within this stream of thought the basic Enlightenment characteristics of freedom, criticism, and progress41 have been rejected in favor of what could be called integral reasoning.42 According to this, none of us stand as completely independent individuals but rather as participants in the cumulative thought of the Christian community, that is, in a core of theological truth dynamically developed in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is sometimes referred to as the catholic consciousness of the Church and at other times simply as the mind of the Church.43 In keeping with this, the individual is encouraged not to criticize and remake everything past, but to find his or her place in the historical continuity of the community and adopt its consciousness. And for that reason development is not viewed as perpetual progress, but rather as the faithful preservation of the common inheritance. The task of the theologian, then, is not to innovate, but to preserve through constant rearticulation. As Pope Stephen put it, “Nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est.”44

This methodological distinction is so fundamental to this project that I will need to illustrate. A great example of the individualistic approach is found in Van Gelder’s survey of historical ecclesiologies. He reviews “five periods in which the church’s thinking about itself led to significant developments in defining the church.”45 As he would have it, each new epoch brought progress in ecclesial self-understanding, that is, definitions of the Church are always changing, yet each is considered equally valid. He starts with the early Church and correctly relates the importance of the four marks of the Church proclaimed by the Creed. But, indicative of the individualistic approach, he goes on to elevate, without any historical or theological justification, a statement about the saints in the Apostles’ Creed and places it on the same level as the four marks of the Nicene Creed. Thus he speaks of five marks.46 But he never discusses the fact that the statement of the ecumenical council was inten...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ecclesial Being
• Chapter 2: Ecclesial Unity
• Chapter 3: Ecclesial Goodness
• Chapter 4: Ecclesial Beauty
• Chapter 5: Ecclesial Integrity
• Conclusions
• Bibliography