Gathering Disciples

Essays in Honor of Christopher J. Ellis

Blyth, Goodliff

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532604393
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This collection of essays by British Baptists honors the work of Christopher Ellis amongst the Baptist community, recognizing in particular the contribution he has made to the practice and theology of Free Church worship. The book takes a selection of his hymns as a starting point for reflection on areas of worship, discipleship, the sacraments, and theology.

1

“Help Us to Search for Truth”

Baptists and Doing Theology

Robert Ellis

Introduction

How do Baptists do theology? In what follows I will pursue an answer to this question by examining the major written work of Christopher Ellis, in particular in dialogue with the systematics of James W. McClendon Jr..; then I will move to consider how these theological clues are reflected in Ellis’s hymn “Learning and Life”; finally, again picking up a cue from McClendon, I will turn to a consideration of Ellis’s life and the theological convictions and methods that may be implicit in it. First, however, it will be useful to consider the question more generally.

The lack of serious theological work by Baptists has been lamented widely. Brian Haymes recalls some gallows-like humor on the subject,1 and when James McClendon reflects upon the dearth of Baptist2 theology he offers a number of reasons, including the harshness of life for early communities, which often faced forms of persecution, and also a tendency to become preoccupied with particular theological issues.

Yet we may also suspect that there are other factors. The stress on inward experience in Baptist spirituality may downplay the significance of the kind of theological reflection that requires some attempt at critical distance between the individual, and the community, and their life of faith. Also, the importance of the Bible in Baptist life has sometimes seemed to render all further theological discourse unnecessary: all that is required is the locating of appropriate texts and their application to any given point at issue. This may seem to many an extraordinarily naïve way of understanding how Scripture functions theologically, but our Baptist communities are, after all, full of simple Bible believers (as Chris’s former college principal, Barrie White, used to twinklingly describe himself). Harmon observes that Baptists, especially since the Enlightenment, have been suspicious of (and indeed antagonistic towards) “tradition.”3 This, we can say, reinforces the impulse always to go directly to the text of Scripture, without any intervening authority or interpreter—though we will see that McClendon has a more positive take on this. A third factor can probably be uncontroversially suggested: Baptist life appears to have a strong pragmatic leaning. With a characteristic emphasis on mission and evangelism, alongside personal experience of Christ, and actively discerning the will of Christ for the life and work of the church, Baptists are typically more comfortable in action than reflection.

These factors may combine to produce in some Baptist communities a certain kind of “anti-theological” disposition. We may speculate that it represents another manifestation of the typically Baptist refusal to concede to any kind of authority outside the self’s conscience or the community’s collective discernment?4

However, this volume is testimony to the fact that some Baptists, at least, are not anti-theological. Recent years have seen a significant number of important theologians and theological works emerge from Baptist communities. From the US, where the recent history of Baptist communities has been scarred by distressing and divisive disputes, we have been given two noteworthy attempts at systematics—by James McClendon5 and Stanley Grenz.6 Recent works by Steven R. Harmon and Curtis W. Freeman have located Baptist theological perspectives within the wider (“catholic”) church with all its breadth and vigor. In the UK we might think of the corpus of Paul S. Fiddes’ work, and also the writings of Stephen R. Holmes, John E. Colwell, and Nigel G. Wright as exemplifying this development. What each of these writers have in common is a concern to address current theological issues generally, and ecclesiological issues in particular, and to do so—in part—through serious dialogue with the church’s theological tradition in general and by engaging as conversation partners with more than four centuries of Baptist thinkers.

Ellis’s Gathering: Spirituality and Theology in Free Church Worship,7 both exemplifies and plays its part in deepening this trend of theological development. It is a work of “Liturgical Theology.” Many Baptists think that “liturgy” is what other Christians do, rather than what we all do—well or less well, and in various forms and patterns. Ellis’s work uses Baptist liturgies as a lens through which the faith of the community is focused and narrated—a clue about Baptists doing theology that we will return to presently.

From a British perspective one more initiative in Baptist theologizing is worth recalling. The collaborative working between a number of British Baptists that bore fruit in a series of “consultations” and volumes that used precisely the terminology deployed in this chapter heading: “doing theology together” or “in a Baptist way.”8 By their own assessment,9 this group seems not at first to have had a great impact on the Baptist Union of Great Britain or upon the way theology is “done” in (British) circles, but a number of achievements might be identified. The first, and theologically most significant perhaps, was the foregrounding of the notion of covenant—understood not just as the voluntary commitment of church members to one another, but as a coinherence of divine and human covenants (“vertical” and “horizontal”) described in terms of God’s prevenient, gracious loving activity.10 Covenant has become a key term in denominational discussions about ministry and associating, though its precise meaning in these discussions remains slippery. A second consequence was an emerging consensus amongst the participants on what “doing theology in a Baptist way” might involve, each of which connects with a key “moment” in Baptist life, the church meeting.

In different ways the participants affirm that when Baptists “do theology” this is a collaborative activity in which, as Fiddes puts it, there are no “solo voices.” Haymes cites as an example of this the production of the second volume of McClendon’s Systematic Theology, for which there was an extensive process of consultation and discussion, drafting and redrafting. This characteristic appears to be a direct consequence of two key Baptist convictions: one is a lack of hierarchy in the Christian community, the other is the conviction that God’s will is discerned when the community comes together. As Holmes puts it, authority resides in Christ alone, but the mind of Christ is known in the gathered community.11

The Baptist Union of Great Britain’s “Declaration of Principle” affirms that “each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit” to interpret Scripture and this corporate discernment is seen as “doing theology in context,” and that also means a particular relationship of the Christian community to Scripture itself. We might say that Baptists will do theology locally, and in direct relationship to the biblical text. More recently, this type of language has come to be linked to the term “reflection upon practice,” an expression in vogue in theological education and in the discipline of practical theology. Baptists ought to make natural practical theologians—and here our pragmatic leaning could serve us well.

My naming of these thinkers and movements is not by any means exhaustive–more could be added from the UK and the US, as well as from many other parts of the world. Considering we Baptists do not do much theology, we are blessed indeed to be heirs to this developing heritage.

Ellis doing “Liturgical Theology”: a clue to “Baptists doing theology”

Speaking about Baptists doing theology may direct our attention away from the study or seminar and towards the concrete life of the Christian congreg...