Apostolicity

The Ecumenical Question in World Christian Perspective

John G. Flett

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899739
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

What constitutes the unity of the church over time and across cultures? Can our account of the church's apostolic faith embrace the cultural diversity of world Christianity?The ecumenical movement that began in the twentieth century posed the problem of the church's apostolicity in profound new ways. In the attempt to find unity in the midst of the Protestant-Catholic schism, participants in this movement defined the church as a distinct culture—complete with its own structures, rituals, architecture and music. Apostolicity became a matter of cultivating the church's own (Western) culture. At the same time it became disconnected from mission, and more importantly, from the diverse reality of world Christianity.In this pioneering study, John Flett assesses the state of the conversation about the apostolic nature of the church. He contends that the pursuit of ecumenical unity has come at the expense of dealing responsibly with crosscultural difference. By looking out to the church beyond the West and back to the New Testament, Flett presents a bold account of an apostolicity that embraces plurality.Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

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The Problem of Apostolicity

The community of faith witnesses to its foundation by caring for its institutions. This witness is its mission. So the church fulfils its mission by caring for the institutions in which Christian certainty and freedom can grow.

Eilert Herms1

It is a cultural imposition on peoples of other cultural matrix to have to embrace these Eurocentric modes of being church to the detriment of their cultural heritage.

Teresa Okure2

1.1 The Primacy of Cultivation in Relation to Communication

The following is a meditation on the critical import of world Christianity for fundamental theology. It considers the pluriformity of the world Christian communion, its evident richness of theologies and structures, to be of material theological significance. Such significance will be tested in relation to apostolicity. The choice is deliberate. Apostolicity sets the parameters of Christian identity, underlying what it means to be catholic. It constitutes an evaluative measure, composed of interpretive means and structural limits, by which a particular communion is received as a member of Christ’s body. Apostolicity, defined as faithfulness to origins expressed in the continuity of mission, often prioritizes historical continuity and its associated institutional means. Precise limits are consequently applied to the cross-cultural engagement and appropriation of the gospel. However celebrated the diversity of Christian expression may be, when presented as a question of apostolicity, a received orthodoxy prevails, one which makes claims on, but remains uninformed by, the developments of world Christianity.

While the aspects of “continuity” and “being sent” both belong to apostolicity, a controlling opposition directs formal treatments of the concept. This results from the “tendency,” identified by Rowan Williams, “to think of ‘mission’ and ‘spirituality’ as pointing in different directions—the communicating of the faith and the cultivation of the faith.”3 Much more than a simple tendency, this reflects an ordering whereby apostolicity is identified first with the cultivation of the faith and so in relation to historical continuity, stability, order and office. Cultivation, in other words, is the governing factor beside which all others are asymmetrically ordered. Its priority shapes the nature and purpose of structures and the ends to which the sacraments and the accompanying interpretive measures, such as order and liturgy, are directed. It conditions theological formulations of the church’s “visibility,” the nature of its historical continuity and the relationship of the local to the universal. It promotes a precise definition of witness, one contingent on growth in the faith and the practices deemed essential to such.

The primacy given to cultivation in the definition of apostolicity both directs and establishes a range of controls over the second direction: the communication of the faith. Communication, especially with the flexibility of form the occasion of cross-cultural translation demands, assumes a secondary and derivative position. As not itself the primary form of Christian witness, mission becomes an “external” act, one detached from the practices associated with formation in the faith. Such mission often enters treatments of apostolicity through a concern for “limits.” The general necessity of mission might be granted, but when considered in relation to unity, to ­historical continuity or to the processes variously termed “inculturation” or “contextualization,” it is evaluated against its potential negative effect over the cultivation of, and maturity in, the faith.4 Mission, by this binary, is not only properly distinguished from Christian spirituality—it is to be approached with an enduring theological caution.

Dominant ecumenical definitions of apostolicity, Protestant and Catholic alike, exploit this ordering of cultivation over communication. The immediate focus of the ecumenical discussion has shifted from the contentious issue of episcopal order to the nature of the Christian community and its mission. Apostolicity is first defined by naming the range of practices and institutions that belong to the “apostolic tradition” before identifying their significance with their “permanence” and service to “Christ’s mission.”5 Apostolicity becomes the expression, the gestalt, of the whole life of the church and the essence of its mission. To cite the Faith and Order study Episkopé and Episcopacy and the Quest for Visible Unity, “within the total life of the church, the gifts of apostolic continuity form parts of a single system of identity, a single system of communication.”6 As this “total life,” apostolicity encompasses the complex of interpretive measures accompanying these practices and institutions. Apostolicity, in more or less explicit terms, is the culture of the church, its being the “people of God.” This culture bears and expresses its missionary witness, confirming the basic nature of cultivation.

The benefit of this position is clear. As a culture, the wider complex of liaisons constitutive of church life becomes necessary to its apostolicity. One cannot intrude on these without also intruding on the church’s living culture and so its witness. Culture explains how the church apostolic remains constant while changing through history. It links the message and mission of the gospel with the existence of a historically visible people. Questions of order reemerge, but as secondary and in service to this people, a necessary expression of this particular culture. This at once relativizes the historical and cultural origins of the traditional order while establishing governing controls for “diversity” in relation to the church. Connecting a social account of the Trinity to the nature of the church as koinonia supplies seemingly clear and ecumenically attractive theological supports. Indeed, the move appears to be something of an ecumenical triumph, garnering ranging support across the traditions.

The singular difficulty with this consensus emerges when setting this definition of apostolicity in relation to the cross-cultural transmission and appropriation of the faith, in relation to world Christianity and its pluriformity of expression.

Christianity beyond the cultural spheres of the former corpus Christianum has been largely uniform in lamenting the faith’s unnecessary “foreignness,” the over-identification of the Christian gospel with its European and American cultural expressions. The wider complaint is well known. To cite Richard King, “in a cross-cultural and post-colonial context the ‘provinciality’ of European ways of understanding the world, is increasingly being highlighted with reference to the historical specificity of their origins and provenance.”7 But what form does this “provinciality” take when conceived in relation to the Christian church? One answer consigns the complaint to some form of “missionary imperialism.” Missions via their relationship with the processes of colonization, so the logic goes, come to bear responsibility for the improper alignment of the Christian gospel and wider Western culture. This reading, while the popular one, fails to attend to the actual forms believers charge with being “Western”: dress, liturgy, order, architecture and the framing of space, patterns of ministry, hymnology, theological questions and idiom, and even the imported structures of schism. In other words, the “foreignness” of Christianity applies not first to some liaison between the faith and external political structures. It bears some relation to the “total life” of the church. One need only refer to the central terms of identity, history, tradition, memory, visibility, the relationship of the local to the universal and of continuity to discontinuity to appreciate the fundamental connection between apostolicity and the cross-cultural transmission and appropriation of the faith.

To conceive the problem as one of Christian faith’s “foreignness” beyond a Western context, however, is only a negative way of stating the point. This approach evaluates world Christianity’s diverse forms in terms of some other singular given. It establishes framing expectations for the gospel’s appropriation. Notably, the institutional question, apostolicity as structure, provides the filter for developments within world Christianity. Ignored is the possibility that the local response to the gospel might produce different structural expressions and that this difference might be essential to maturity in the faith. One question basic to the discussion of apostolicity is whether and to what extent its standards are “located,” that is, reflect a certain historical expression of the faith, and whether these might be applied without remainder to the pluriform expressions found in world Christianity. Alternately stated, is not world Christianity itself a development within the catholic faith, positively informing the church’s recognition of its own apostolicity? Might apostolicity be defined in terms of, and not in contest with, the diverse expressions of world Christianity? In this approach apostolicity would cease to be an issue of how these communions correspond to a supposedly “timeless” gospel expressed through the given language and institution of the church universal and become one of how they proclaim the gospel in vernacular word, deed and structure. A theology of apostolicity, in other words, should approach the positive expressions of Christianity now evident in multiple centers around the world not as potential threats to the continuity of the faith but as embodying the very nature of that continuity.

A basic contest develops when conceiving apostolicity in cultural terms. The range of necessary qualifications notwithstanding, the church apostolic relates to other geographical locations through a process of replication and opposes the polycentrism and pluriformity of expression characteristic of world Christianity. Formulated in these stark terms, the claim is a big one and requires demonstration. Such is the task through the first half of the work. But to accomplish this, it is necessary to forestall an interpretive assumption. Conceiving apostolicity through the lens of world Christianity resists reading the Protestant/Catholic schism as the primary interpretive framework. This study contests the variety of binary oppositions (those of institution against charisma and of missionary flexibility against settled structure) that follow when schism determines apostolicity’s constructive definition. Whatever implications follow for this ecumenical question, they are secondary to the positive form of apostolicity that world Christianity suggests. To shift the debate from its expected ecumenical location, we begin with the opposition of the communication against the cultivation of the faith and its determinative effect for apostolicity.

1.2 The Communication of the Faith

The communication of the faith, in that it must speak in a comprehensible manner within a variety of languages and locations, expects a certain contingency of expression. Context, to a varying extent, informs the method and content of the faith’s communication. Insofar as mission remained a mediating task external to the church, such circumstantial flexibility received theological sanction. At least in theory, however, to cite John Paul II, mission is no longer “a marginal task for the Church but is situated at the center of her life, as a fundamental commitment of the whole People of God.”8 While this may sound commendable, much of the theological suspicion attached to the missionary communication of the faith focuses on this issue of flexibility, the supposed freedom of form and its consequence for ecclesiology. The contest is obvious. Mission, in that it draws cultural difference into the church, intrudes on the range of institutions, structures, artifacts, symbols and gestures considered basic to Christian koinonia, to the cultivation of the community and to its visible continuity. Cross-cultural transmission is often perceived as a source for disunity and may, as such, dilute Christian witness. Given this, it is worth considering how this now axiomatic drawing of mission into the church is understood in relation to the structures considered basic to apostolicity.

1.2.1 Missionary flexibility. As it developed in the twentieth century, the notion of a missionary church has a rather specific genealogy. The supposed “maturation” of the former “missions” (a recognition of their becoming independent church bodies), combined with the recognition of colonization as a problem for local Christian identity, prompted a radical redefinition of missionary method and act. Mission could no longer be something simply external to the church. The church itself became...