The Cruciform Church, Annivesary Edition

Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World

C. Leonard Allen

• Publisher: Abilene Christian University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780891126546
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

What is left of the Gospel if you take away the cross?This central question, asked by C. L. Loos but tucked away in a nineteenth-century journal, launched The Cruciform Church twenty-five years ago. Read by a generation of ministers and church leaders, The Cruciform Church began a reimagination of the church in our increasingly, secular age.Now updated, with responses from eight key leaders, this contemporary classic aims to reach a new generation with the critical questions of faith and life.New Responses by:
- Sara Barton
- Richard Beck
- Lee Camp
- Raymond Carr
- Randy Harris
- John Mark Hicks
- Scot McKnight
- Jonathan Storment

1

The Search for Identity

. . . What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
—Wendell Berry (1975)

The golden age only comes to men when they
have, if only for a moment, forgotten gold.
—G. K. Chesterton (1932)

In his book Watership Down, author Richard Adams created an intriguing world inhabited by rabbits. The story focuses on the adventures of a scraggly band of rabbits who leave a large established warren in order to find themselves a new home.¹

Among them is Hazel, who later becomes the leader, and Fiver, Hazel’s strange brother who possesses the gifts of a seer. They are joined by several others: Bigwig, an ambitious rabbit who seeks power and position, Pipkin, who is small and weak and constantly needing help, and Blackberry, who possesses great intelligence and wisdom. Together they leave their warren because of Fiver’s cryptic warning that it will be destroyed. And together they establish a new warren at Watership Down.

The reader quickly learns that rabbits live in a dangerous world—a world of trappers, hunters, predatory animals, and threatening rabbits. To survive in such a world they must band together, pooling all their wit and cunning and learning to appreciate one another’s gifts.

Furthermore, their survival depends upon learning and retelling the stories of the rabbits who have gone before them. For in those stories they learn about the dangers rabbits face and gain the skills to negotiate those dangers. From those stories they learn to face a dangerous environment in a manner appropriate to rabbits.

The motley group of rabbits that form Watership Down cherish the stories of El-ahrairah, a great hero among the early rabbits. The stories tell of his cleverness and wit. They recount with delight and humor the tricks he used to outwit his enemies and gain advantage for his fellow rabbits.

The telling of those stories binds them together. It helps them work together and value the gifts of even the weakest members of the group. Bigwig learns to trust the others. Blackberry learns that his impeccable logic is not always sufficient. They all learn to care for Pipkin in his weakness. The stories form their identity as a community.

But the time came when the rabbits encountered a warren that no longer maintained the traditions of El-ahrairah. These rabbits had forgotten how to tell the stories and thus how to work together and to appreciate each rabbit’s gifts. As a result they had grown weak and disoriented. They recognized no leader—each one simply did as he pleased. They lacked the skills to recognize danger and to defend themselves. So they easily fell prey to the farmers’ traps. By failing to treasure and retell the stories of El-ahrairah, they had forgotten the ways of wild rabbits.

In his story Adams tells us something not so much about rabbits as about people. He shows the importance of forging links with those who have gone before. He underscores the vital place of traditions in living well and in maintaining a strong sense of identity.

Losing the Past

One of the chief characteristics of modern secular culture is the loss of this sense of connectedness to the past. The spirit of individualism, rampant in our time, says: “You can be whatever you choose to be. Forget the past. Disregard its traditions. Dismiss its stories. Accept none of its constraints. Bear no responsibilities for its failures. For you are perfectly free to order your own life, to go your own way.” As Lewis Smedes puts it, “our culture urges us not to define our life in terms of past commitments but in terms of present needs and future possibilities.”²

As this happens the sense of personal or group identity erodes, for as Alasdair MacIntyre insists, one’s identity is always rooted in a particular story or tradition. “I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle. . . . I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. . . I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships.”³

A strong sense of identity requires a sense of continuity with the past. Particularly in times of rapid change (like ours), it requires what Robert Bellah has called a “community of memory.” Without such communities we grow increasingly disoriented. We lose the ability to recognize dangers and respond to them in ways appropriate to human beings. We lose the capacity to sustain our ideals and commitments; we become more utilitarian, more prone to let the current status quo shape our identity.

The effects of losing the past appear strikingly in the mainline Protestant churches of the 1960s. Captivated by a consumerist economy, many churches rushed to find ever more relevant ways of appealing to the culture. In the process, they devalued or even scorned their historic traditions. “Modernist protestantism,” Leonard Sweet argues, “remained hopelessly estranged from the voices of its past, its members having almost entirely forgotten how to live historically in conversation with their classic traditions.”⁴

Among Churches of Christ we find ourselves facing a similar situation. We too face a kind of identity crisis. Although many factors contribute to it, three seem particularly significant.

First, there is the simple fact that all religious traditions change from one generation to the next. Changes may be subtle, but the very process of passing on a set of beliefs inevitably alters them. Thus, we find that Churches of Christ today are not the same as they were in the 1940s and 50s and that those of the 1940s and 50s were significantly different from those of the 1870s.

Second, this inevitable change has been accelerated in this generation by the virtually complete breakup of the rural world (or ethos) that originally shaped the identity of Churches of Christ in the late nineteenth century. One recent scholar, in a study of the sweeping agricultural and economic changes that thoroughly reshaped the South between 1920 and 1960, spoke of “rural worlds lost.”⁵ In the demise of those worlds, we lost part of our past.

Third, the secular ethos of our time, with its rampant individualism and pluralism, now places enormous pressures upon us. Drawn into the religious marketplace and pressured by the consumer’s addiction to newness, we are further cut off from our historic roots.

Accepting a Past

How should we respond to an identity crisis? Like the rabbits of Watership Down we must forge links with our past. We must learn to tell its stories. The thesis of this book is that by facing our past and learning to appropriate it, we can chart with renewed clarity our course for the future.

Doing this means taking the step of locating ourselves within time. It means acknowledging that we indeed have a past, a human tradition, and that to a significant degree we are products of that past.

But what may appear at first as a simple task really is not. For our heritage, the Stone-Campbell Movement, arose out of a profound disenchantment with the past. Like many Americans in the early decades of American nationhood, Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, Walter Scott, and other early forebears sought to dismiss the past with all its limitations. The past had bequeathed spiritual confusion, moral decay, sectarian wrangling, and a deadening traditionalism. So they sought to sweep away the confusion and decay, to abandon the polluted stream for the pure spring.

This attitude toward the past characterized the early movement. Sometimes it found striking expression. Alexander Campbell could write, for example, that “On the subject of religion I am fully persuaded that nothing but the inspired scriptures ought ever to have been published.”⁶ Nineteen centuries of Christian reflection and writing, in other words, served only to obscure and inhibit the practice of true Christianity.

Propelled by such an attitude toward the past, restoration movements like ours easily develop a kind of historylessness.⁷ By this term I refer to the perception that, while other churches or movements are snared in the web of profane history, one’s own church or movement stands above mere human history. One’s own movement partakes only of the perfections of the first age, the sacred time of pure beginnings. While other movements lurch along through the quagmire of time, one’s own movement strolls confidently on the firm streets of eternity. While others stagger under the load of traditions bequeathed them by the past, one’s own group has no real history and thus no load of tradition to shoulder.

This sense of historylessness works in powerful and subtle ways. In the process it creates exhilarating (and damaging) illusions. Among Churches of Christ it often has meant that we simply discounted eighteen centuries of Christianity as, at worst, a diseased tumor or, at best, an instructive failure.

And not surprisingly, the same attitude has led many people among Churches of Christ to dismiss their own history as itself irrelevant. For after all, if our origins come entirely from the Bible and our churches are New Testament churches, nothing more and nothing less, then we really need not bother ourselves with the recent past. Indeed, it too might simply serve to distract us from our true calling.

But clearly some people among Churches of Christ have bothered with the past. Some have searched through the annals of their own restoration movement and on occasion ranged further afield to the larger story of Christianity through the ages. But even here, most often, one can discern a kind of historylessness at work. To be sure, it is much more subtle than simply dismissing the past. Here one attends to the past, sometimes even with great energy and diligence, but in the process one lays upon the past a preformed pattern or schema—a traditional pattern of the church’s fall and restoration.

This pattern then becomes the key that quickly and simply makes sense of the past. It functions like a procrustean bed: one stretches and trims history’s main actors and movements to fit the pattern. For one does not seek so much to find a complex and tangled story told in black, white, and many shades of gray, but a simple story of the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the true and the untrue. One wants to separate the scattering of good guys from the host of bad guys, making it unmistakably clear just who stands with us and who against us.

The restorationist can do this due to one important factor: he easily assumes that he himself is not really part of the history he surveys, that he is not fully part of the historical process with all its limitations and strictures. He actually stands above history, disentangled from its sticky web. He dwells on a lofty overlook, standing as it were among Plato’s timeless Forms and with them measuring the change and decay that constantly settles over all things temporal.

Such is the allure of the sense of historylessness: either to dismiss church history altogether or, more subtly, to pass judgment upon it as if we ourselves were not part of its stream. In either case, most all of Christian history finally becomes little more than a tragic story of decay and corruption, a dark plot in which one can indeed discern people who seem to possess noble motives and admirable courage but all of whom are finally exposed either as villains or as naive pawns, and all implicated in the high crime of poisoning the pure stream of truth.

This sense of historylessness has predominated in our movement. And that predominance has inhibited and distorted our theological efforts in several ways.

For one thing, such attitudes toward the past have given rise to unfair and inaccurate views of the past. They have caused us to approach history as polemics and as hagiography. The two approaches usually go hand in hand. The polemical approach caricatures those outside our movement to prove them wrong; the hagiographical approach idealizes and idolizes those within the movement to prove us right.

In this way we typically made short work of pre-restoration history. Most often we plundered it for case studies of corruption, for examples of “human invention,” and for glimpses of aborted restorations. In the process we sought not so much to understand earlier Christian movements in all their complexity. We sought rather to decry them or on occasion simply to ridicule them. For they obviously ran in the stream of profane history, swept along by little more than human willfulness and ignorance.

But our movement was different. It did not run in any wide and turgid stream. Rather, it gushed directly out of the spring, forming only a crystal clear pool around it. Our leaders were larger-than-life figures, religious geniuses, people who never mixed eternal truth with temporal clay. And so we often constructed romantic chronicles, pitting unmixed Truth against the hosts of ignorance and Untruth. It was an exciting story, almost the stuff of epics and legends.

Sometimes this approach to the past was subtle and...