Deep Church Rising

Recovering the roots of Christian orthodoxy

Andrew G. Walker

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780281072729
• eBook ISBN: 9780281072736
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The major cultural changes in Western societies since the Reformation have created a serious challenge for the Church. Modernity in particular has been inhospitable to Christian orthodoxy and many have been tempted to reject classical versions of the faith. This has led to a division within churches that Walker and Parry name 'the third schism,' a divide between those who embrace what C. S. Lewis called 'mere Christianity' or 'deep church,' and those who do not. This book is a call to embrace deep church, to remember our future, to make a half-turn back to premodernity. Not in order to repeat the past but in order to find often forgotten resources for the present. Embracing the spirituality of deep church, according to Walker and Parry, is the only way that the church can be true to its calling in the midst of the postmodern world.

PART ONE

The Third Schism: On Losing the Gospel

1

INTRODUCTION

The Third Schism and Deep Church

CHRISTIANITY IS NOW ON sale in multiform shapes and sizes. Competing in the open market with other religions, there is a bewildering yet broad choice of “real” and “best” Christianities for anyone who wants to buy. No doubt someone will soon publish The Consumer Guide to God so that people can pop in and out of churches with the same ease and comfort as they visit their favorite restaurants.

“You pays your money and takes your choice” surely exemplifies the “spirit of the age”; for in our culture religion is not seen as the raison d’être of our society and life: it is a series of options that we choose—or goods that we buy—if we feel so inclined. This plurality of religious belief and practice is often applauded as evidence of cultural maturity and tolerance. Nobody forces a version on us any more. There are many varieties on sale vying for our attention, but we, the consumers, have the absolute power of either buying one version in preference to another or withholding payment altogether.

In this sense, of course, we have to admit to being just part of the crowd like everybody else. While we accept the inevitability of this, and while we run the logical risk of being hoist by our own petard, we want to assert in this introduction that the Christian gospel has a central core of truth that has an objective character about it. Christian faith is not like a lump of clay that we can reshape however we see fit. While it comes in many shapes and sizes they represent variations on a theme, sharing a common root in the apostolic witness to Jesus maintained by the community of the church. It is, in other words, not infinitely malleable but has a “this and not that” character.

The purpose of this assertion, however, is not so that we can demonstrate this objectivity in a logical way, but in order that we can make out a plausible case that the Christianity of the historic church, of the ancient creeds, and sacred scriptural canons needs to be on guard against being swallowed by something else in the name of religious progress; of capitulating to a different gospel.

To say this is to come clean and admit two things. First, that we are traditionalists or primitivists of sorts, and believe that the Christian faith is founded on biblical revelations concerning a loving God and his incarnation in the world through the historical person of Jesus Christ. Such a belief takes some swallowing today, or in any age, and cannot be demonstrated as factual in a scientific or empirical way. After all, God as traditionally conceived by Christians is not simply a being, not even the Supreme Being, alongside or on the same plane as other beings. The church has usually sought to maintain that God’s reality is of a fundamentally different order from anything in creation. God dwells “in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes,” and simply cannot be studied by scientific or other empirical methods. So, for instance, while historians may indeed be able to offer insights on the historical Jesus they will simply be unable to declare in their capacity as historians whether Jesus really was God incarnate. How could one empirically assess that? This is not to say, however, that such a belief is false, and certainly it is not to say that it is irrational. It is simply to say that there are some aspects of reality that are beyond the limits of scientific rationality and method. (It should go without saying that this is no threat to science, only to scientism, the ideology that all truth claims about the world can be assessed by the sciences.)

The second thing to admit is that we are not approaching this introduction from an Empyrean vantage point nor with the logical disinterest of a mathematical calculator. Christianity, the religion of the apostles, tattered and divided as it is by schism and heresy—but still bearing the marks of God’s grace—has very gradually over the past four hundred years entered what is one of the most serious tests of its two-thousand-year history. We passionately want to see that faith both survive and strengthen in the face of modern Christian alternatives.

We have chosen, therefore, polemic rather than a careful historical analysis as the medium to express both passion and conviction. The polemic—that Christendom has entered its third and most serious schism—is, we believe, true, and is based on historical argument that is rational and open to refutation. As to whether the schism is a good or a bad thing, that depends on which side of the present divide you stand.

To say that we are dealing with a protracted crisis in Christendom, which can be characterized as a third schism, necessitates a brief mention of the first two divides, and something about the meaning of schism. “Schism” is a word that we usually associate with a breach in the unity of the visible church. The so-called Great Western Schism of 1378–1417, for example, was a break in the unity of the (Western) Catholic Church due to disputed elections to the papacy in which, until the schism was healed, there were competing popes.

As serious a schism as this was, however, it was not of the magnitude of the really great divides of Christendom. Furthermore, the word “schism” means to divide, cleave, or rend. It is this more general sense of major division with which we are concerned rather than the idea of a visible split. The first two great schisms of Christianity, between the Eastern and Western churches, and the Western Reformation, were indeed visible divides. The third schism, because it cuts across denominations rather than between them, is not invisible (we can see it happening), but it is not yet denomination against denomination creating visible and separate camps within Christendom. In that sense it differs from the other schisms.

The First Schism: The Divide between the Western and Eastern Churches

It says a great deal for our parochial worldview that Christianity is seen as a Western religion. Western students of theology take some time to adjust to the fact that the Western Reformation is only part of a far more fundamental divide of the Christian church. This division has its origins in the inability of the Greek East and Latin West to cohere.

Although the official date of the Great Schism is 1054, this is too simplistic. In reality the two halves of Christendom had been pulling apart for centuries. The unilateral addition by the Latin West of the word filioque (“and the Son”) to the Nicene creed (which now said of the Holy Spirit, “who proceeds from the Father and the Son”) and the decision by the Roman See that the Bishop there was to be seen no longer as Primus inter pares (the first among equals) but as possessing superior and unique authority in the Christian church, are the main reasons cited by Eastern Catholics (the Orthodox) for the Great Schism (see Appendix 1).

This is not untrue, but it is also the case that the nature of spirituality, liturgy, and theology increasingly developed along separate lines as Eastern and Western cultures evolved and diverged.

Henceforth the Orthodox continued without Pope and without reformation (to this day), and the Catholic Church—cut off from the collegiality of the Eastern sister churches—went it alone in an increasingly centralized and Westernized way. The essential tragedy of the schism was that the universal catholicity of the “one undivided church” was broken.

The council of Florence in 1438–39 looked as if it might heal the rift between East and West. In the event, it was a let down. The political background to the council was that the Eastern churches, Byzantium in particular, were under threat from the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Byzantine Emperor proposed a union of East and West as the only way to prevent the collapse of Byzantium and the capture of Constantinople. The West were keen for reunification.

The Council discovered that the contentious filioque clause (on which, see Appendix 1) was only one of the difficulties between them. Perhaps most serious of all was the bitterness left by the fourth crusade: in 1204 the West had set out to rescue the Holy places from the Saracens in Jerusalem and yet ended up besieging and sacking Byzantium, killing many thousands of men, women, and children, fellow Christians from Constantinople, raping women (even nuns), and sacking churches, convents, and monastries, stealing the holy relics from the city. All this was rightly seen by the East as an act of unspeakable religious sacrilege. Of course, the East itself was not without sin. Western anger had been stirred by the Massacre of the Latins, a large-scale massacre of Catholics living in Constantinople in 1182. Western hostility following that atrocity lay behind the attack on Constantinople in 1203 and 1204. (It should go without saying that both of these events are utterly incompatible with the calling of the gospel-shaped church.)

However, despite their differences, all the Western and all the Eastern delegates, with the exception of two Eastern bishops (most famously Mark of Ephesus), did sign the Decree of Union on 6 July 1439. So it appeared that the schism was over.

This was not to be. When the general populous in the East, stirred by members of the Eastern Church, heard that their leaders had signed an accord with the West they almost unanimously rejected it. In our opinion this popular resistance was motivated by the bitterness left over from the atrocities committed against Constantinople by the Crusaders. Mark of Ephesus, who had refused to sign (on the grounds that he considered the filioque clause heretical) became a saint and those who signed the Decree of Union were reviled. (This raises an important issue—conciliar councils, ecumenical councils, and scriptural canons are all very well but you have to carry people with you.) Constantinople fell in May 1453 and after that any chance of a proper reconciliation was lost.

In recent decades there have been numerous encouraging ecumenical discussions between the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church exploring the rocky and painful path toward the restoration of communion and unity. Pope John Paul II expressed the deep sorrow of Catholics over the thirteenth-century massacre in Contantinople to the Archbishop of Athens (2001) and to the Patriarch of Constantinople (2004). In 2004 the Patriarch formally accepted the Pope’s apology in the “spirit of reconciliation of the resurrection.” These are small but encouraging signs. Unity is not immanent, but neither is it unimaginable, unrealistic, or impossible.

The Second Schism: The Reformation

The second great divide in Christendom shares with the first schism the characteristic of a gradual breaking down of catholicity. While it may be true that the Roman Catholic Church maintained a powerful hegemony throughout the early Middle Ages, its influence began to wane as Renaissance humanism, the emergence of a natural philosophy that owed little to revelation, and the rise of an embryonic capitalism, weakened the omnipresent authority of the Western Church. The fact that Martin Luther nailed his famous principles of the Reformation faith to the door of the church at Wittenburg in 1517 is only an historical landmark in the greater reformation of medieval society.

Protestants like to see the Reformation as a great recovery: a return to New Testament Christianity. Undeniably, Protestantism has shown itself to be full of life and vigor, but it has also demonstrated that by its very nature it is schismatic. The Reformation became reformation ad nauseum, and modern denominationalism was born. This was inevitable while the reformers saw Protestantism as replacing the authority of the Pope with the authority of the Bible. It was also the case that now every person was their own “pope” and could—and did—interpret the Bible according to his or her own lights.

Furthermore, religious Protestantism paved the way for its own demise and the third schism of recent years. Once it was accepted that Scripture stood alone outside tradition, and could be interpreted correctly by anyone with a pure heart and God-given rationality (or who was led by the Spirit), it was not too big a step to suggest that the same could be said of nature. The emergence of reasoning independent from the church, begun in the Renaissance, was accelerated under Protestantism, and heralded both the rise of the scientific method and the birth of the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. We shall explore this more in the next chapter.

With the first Great Schism, the West separated from the East; the second schism, the Reformation, saw Protestantism freeing itself from the authority of the Catholic Church. The Enlightenment, like Prometheus unbound, tore Western culture away from the authority of Christian tradition and the Bible. This not only marked the beginning of modern secularism, but it was also a key element in the slow process of the third schism.

Since that time, Protestantism has become increasingly naked and vulnerable, as its progeny (the secular doctrines of the Enlightenment) has turned on its parent with all the fury of Oedipal rage.

The Third Schism

Christianity in the Developing World, and in Eastern Europe, is clearly both growing, and often growing in a more orthodox fashion than in Western Europe and North America. It is primarily in the West that what we are calling “the third schism” has become an issue. As institutional religion has been in decline for over two hundred years, and religious categories of thought have been under constant attack for the same period, this is not very surprising. It is impossible, living in the Western world, not to be influenced by the modern worldview, and the mores and habits of the secular culture.

In the decades since the landmark publication of Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest To God (1963), the endemic nature of the third schism has become more acute; so that today we find that a significant number of ecclesiastical leaders, theologians, and many ordinary men and women, can no longer relate to the central tenets of Christianity as traditionally understood. That is to say that growing numbers of people want to remain Christian in some way, despite the fact that they can no longer assent to many of the doctrines of the creeds, believe in the Bible as a broadly reliable record of historical narratives, or find credible the possibility of miracles in either the past (including the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ) or the present. As one priest said to his congregation before they recited the Nicene Creed, “This is the part we say with our fingers crossed.”

Despite the first two great schisms of Christianity, there was enough common ground to assert that there was a family resemblance of Christians, even though the family was separated and relationships impaired. This resemblance was related to a certain “οrthοpraxis”—a way of living and behaving that was seen as being connected in some way with an orthodoxy, a right faith or right believing. In practice the link between these two has always been tentative. It cannot be said with certainty that ordinary Christians wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of contents
• Praise for This Book
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• PART ONE—The Third Schism: On Losing the Gospel
• PART TWO—Deep Church: On Recovering the Gospel
• Appendix 1: The Nicene Creed and the Filioque
• Appendix 2: Deep Church and Fundamentalism
• Bibliography