One Lord, One Faith, Second Edition

A Theology for Cross-Denominational Renewal

Koivisto

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274951
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

One Lord, One Faith is a plea and plan to re-envision the Church as a broad, cross-denominational community with a shared faith in the Christ of the Gospel. It both affirms the place and inevitability of individual denominational traditions, and also provides a grid from which to distinguish those denominational traditions from the core of historical orthodoxy shared by the entire Christian community. The book seeks to distinguish denominationalism from sectarianism, and identifies sectarianism as the true enemy of historic catholicity.

1

The Church at the Start

Roots in Genuine Catholicity

I therefore know no distinction, but am ready to break the bread and drink the cup of holy joy with all who love the Lord and will not lightly speak evil of His name.

—Anthony Norris Groves

It was 1969. I was an undergraduate student at a university in California during the height of the counterculture movement. Myself: I was a new Christian, come to personal faith just before entering college. The mood on campus was common for the era: anti-anything-that-was-viewed-as-establishment. And it seemed that everyone was at least a touch on the radical edge, from philosophy professors who canceled classes to join in the anti-war demonstrations, to those “Jesus Freak” types who strode onto campus and preached loudly in the Agora adjoining the cafeteria. And any of us who claimed to really believe in Christ came in for a fair share of scholarly and social ridicule. So I prepared myself for challenges every day as I walked on campus.

One day as I arrived for classes, I recall seeing bright iridescent orange signs posted all over the campus. Approaching the nearest one, I wasn’t very close at all when the message shouted out to me:

TO HELL WITH CHURCH! LECTURE IN HALL 1003 FRIDAY, 3:30 P.M. BE THERE

My first thoughts were: “Oh great! Another blast at Christianity.” But I made a mental note to be there and offer my two bits’ worth of apologetics.

I arrived early that Friday. The lecture hall was already packed with people. I was certain the crowd mostly consisted of opponents to the Christian message, who were simply looking for more evidence to chortle at Christianity.

The lecturer was an off-campus unknown. “Probably an antiwar, antiestablishment political activist who came over from Berkeley,” I thought. He began (as I expected) by lambasting the institutional church as just one more example of “establishment” oppression. I gritted my teeth. “Right On!” punctuated the lecture hall from time-to-time. But before long he did an unexpected transition: “But check this out: don’t confuse the ‘establishment’ churches with Christianity. The essence of Christianity has always been Christ. Don’t reject Christ because the church is messed up.” He then developed a fair Gospel message and apologetic on his own before a bewildered and increasingly hostile audience.

The audience left angry. They felt cheated. Based on the signs that had lured them in, they came expecting a lecture sympathetic with their anti-Christian preferences—and instead they got a dose of “fundamentalist” Christianity. But the point for all to see was that, to the lecturer, Christianity had little to do with the “establishment” church. The church was the “bad guy.” And Christ was not to be confused with the institutional church.

Before long, and not to be outdone, the local Roman Catholic Coalition sponsored a series of lectures on campus in response. Their signs, posted on similarly eye-catching material, retorted:

IT’S A HELL OF A CHURCH! LECTURE IN HALL 1205 THURSDAY, 3:30 P.M. BE THERE

Few people came to this lecture, however. It was not as if they felt they couldn’t trust these kinds of signs anymore. It was simply a fact recognized by the earlier lecturer: nobody wanted to hear anyone speaking favorably about any “institutional” organization. The church was too “establishment” for 1969. The first lecturer at least had that right. The mood of the era was certainly “to hell with church!” But his antithesis was a problem. Was it really Christ or the church? Or had he got the notion of the church a bit confused?

Two primary indictments of the church on the part of the budding intellectuals there led to a justification of this frustration:

• A disgust over the authoritarian history of the church prior to the Reformation (the rather arrogant and petty papal forcing of a schism into Eastern and Western church, religio-political corruption in Europe, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition).

• Frustration over the church subsequent to the Reformation (the proliferation of denominations and sects with competing and mutually exclusive claims, yielding much in the way of hypocritical strife).

So, the church as an “institution” was bad.

But suspicion of organizational institutions claiming the name church is not just found among antiestablishment types who survived the sixties. The same is apparent among Protestants, particularly evangelical Protestants, and especially those of the free church tradition,1 who are fairly quick to look with disdain on the more historic institutional churches claiming some sort of apostolic succession,2 such as the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglican/Episcopalian churches. Marsden, for example, observes the following:

One of the striking features of much of evangelicalism is its general disregard for the institutional church. Except at the congregational level, the organized church plays a relatively minor role in the movement. Even the local congregation, while extremely important for fellowship purposes, is often regarded as a convenience to the individual. Ultimately, individuals are sovereign and can join or leave churches as they please.3

The alternative to these large institutional structures woven around episcopal succession is, in fact, the highly proliferate patchwork of hundreds and thousands of independent Protestant groups. Although the anti-institutional mode left over from the sixties can support a stance against institutionalization in the church, what of the other criticism, that Protestant Christians are incredibly divided? Do these divisions destroy the unity of the church? That is the problem that must be squarely faced in today’s church, for denominational and sectarian lines continue to exist and have an impact on popular perceptions of the church.4

As confusion over the nature of the church persists, just how are we to understand it? Is the church to be conceived of as an external and visible organization, a purely invisible or spiritual organism of some sort, or both? If it is external in any way, is it to be exclusively identified with any of the existing external structures? And how are we to conceive of any notion of one church in view of the multiplicity of external groups, and their often mutually exclusive claims to be the only and original church of Jesus? The historic organizational structures of the church argue toward a unity that is focused around an historic episcopate. The multiple Protestant subgroups more frequently argue toward a doctrinal and moral purity in the church, and that organizational unity must play a second position to that. With all that, where really is the church?

This chapter will begin our examination of these questions by looking at the church in the New Testament (I hope, with some fresh questions). It will also look at the church from the standpoint of the early subapostolic Christianity of the second century. We should find that the church understood itself to be one great community gathered around a core of apostolic teaching and that outside that apostolic core there was, even then, an acceptable diversity on secondary issues. The second century term for this was that the church was a catholic church. Let me explain.

THE CHURCH IN THE FIRST CENTURY: A COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS IN THE SON OF GOD

We often use the term church today in reference to a structure or building. We say, “Meet me in the parking lot of the Baptist church on Third and Oak.” We mean, of course, that a building exists there that is used by a group of Christians who identify with Baptist distinctives. At other times, we use the term “church” as a specific subset of the church at large: a denomination or association of like-minded Christians. We have this meaning when we say, “I belong to the Lutheran church.” It’s another way of saying, “I’m a Lutheran.” But both of these uses are derivative rather than foundational, and may mislead us in terms of capturing the flavor of what the church is really about.

As we turn to the New Testament (the first place the term is used in its typical sense of Christians), we find several dimensions regarding the nature of the church. The earliest use of the term is in fact connected to people: Jesus responds to Peter’s confession and says, “you are Peter and on this rock [alluding to Peter] I will build my church [=community of people]” (Matt 16:18). Jesus was establishing for Himself one great messianic community. The emphasis is primarily on Peter as a prototype of the personal confessor of faith in Jesus and His messianic claims. As such, the idea is that the church is primarily a people, not a structure or organization.5

The church is not a building, although it typically needs one in which to meet (especially in wet climates like here in western Oregon!). It is not an institution, although it requires institutional elements of leadership and organization as it grows numerically. It is, instead, fundamentally a people who have come to faith in Christ and therefore gather together on the basis of that shared faith.6

With this in mind, as we look at the New Testament, the people of Jesus Christ are seen in three dimensions: as a locally gathering community in a geographical area (typically a city); as a locally gathering community in a home; and as the entire community of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Church at the Start
• Chapter 2: The Church in History
• Chapter 3: Denominationalism and Catholicity
• Chapter 4: Catholicity and Tradition or, Do Protestants have Tradition?
• Chapter 5: Biblical Hermeneutics as the Key to Tradition and Catholicity
• Chapter 6: The Search for a Core Orthodoxy for Catholicity
• Chapter 7: Developing a Personal Catholicity Today
• Excursus One: Detecting Denominational Traditions, Part 1
• Excursus Two: Detecting Denominational Traditions, Part 2
• Appendix A: Ancient Creeds and Formulations of the Church
• Appendix B: The Chicago Call
• Appendix C: Articles Appearing in The Fundamentals (1910–15)
• Appendix D: Interdenominational Evangelical Statements of Faith
• Appendix E: How One Brethren Assembly Situates Itself in Relation to the Rest of the Church
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography