Faculty white papers and essays on a variety of topics, broken into sections and presented in a weekly serial fashion – one paper or essay presented each month. The views of the particular presenter are not necessarily the views of Gordon-Conwell.

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What Difference Does Difference Make? Evangelicals and the Clash of Traditions

Richard Lints, PhD
Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology



Introduction

Many have lamented the vast diversity of Protestant denominations on the American landscape. Why cannot Christians agree more often, so the lament continues. If in particular evangelicals might emphasize generosity a little bit more and orthodoxy a little bit less, the evangelical movement might not be so fractured. This has inevitably led to the “post-denominational” cry of many emergent evangelicals and those who have been trying to reinvent the church for the better part of the last generation.

Let me suggest the fracturing of the Christian church is surely not ideal, but it is not the robust embrace of orthodox doctrine which undermines the unity of the church nor are denominations the underlying cause of the fragmented nature of evangelicalism. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that evangelicalism has never had an ecclesial identity,¹ and the latest hand-wringing about the fragmentation of the church is more symptomatic of a naïve embrace of the social ideals of democracy and the lack of a theologically rich and enduring ecclesial identity. However, the pleas for a post-partisan post-denominational evangelicalism may well provide an opportunity to rethink our paradigms of ecclesial unity. This essay is a small part of that project.

In what follows I am concerned to sketch the dangers and opportunities for the church when democracy is taken seriously as our present social polity. I do not intend here to pay much attention to democracy in the public square though that is an important question in its own right. My central interest is the social polity of the ecclesial square, viz., that public space between churches and church bodies about which the “unity” question is centered. Affirming that there is an ecclesial square is to affirm that the church exists in the visible connections between local, regional, national and international church bodies. If the church is fragmented as we all seem to agree, the ecclesial square is the place of fragmentation. How we conceive and configure that ecclesial square is of the utmost importance today.

Towards that end I want to consider the diverse ways of dealing with diversity inside the ecclesial square. I want to think theologically about the diversity in which the church is embedded in our time and place and thereby to think more carefully about the unity of the church. I also want to argue that the wisdom of the gospel may give us the most sure-footed means of dealing with the question of unity and diversity in the church.

A Nation of Choosers

The recent massive survey of religion in American life by the Pew Forum on Religion (Landscape Survey, Feb-June 2008) reminded us that church commitment sits lightly on those who attend church. The study told us that Americans shop for church as they might shop for groceries. There is nothing strikingly new in this phenomenon. America has been a nation of choosers for a very long time. Peter Berger claimed nearly thirty years ago that when religion is strictly a matter of consumer choice, the very nature of that religious conviction undergoes a profound change.² He referred to it as the “Heretical Imperative”. When religious conviction is chosen as one might choose any other commodity, it ceases to have much traction in people’s lives. It ceases to be an integrating center for them and increasingly notions of orthodoxy prove problematic. This is the “heretical” part of Berger’s “Heretical Imperative”. Being a consumer also puts people into a distinctly different relationship to their local church. When people shop for church, the church as a durable institution is pushed to the margins and becomes peripheral to more pressing concerns.

Though church attendance in the U.S. remained relatively stable over the last two decades according to the Pew Survey, it noticed how frequently people change church and change church traditions. There was no enduring place in people’s lives for a church tradition since people moved so fluidly across traditions. They noticed how frequently people married across traditions, how frequently people migrated across traditions of church membership, and how frequently people trained their children in multiple religious traditions. Nearly half of adults in the U.S. have switched to a faith other than the one in which they were raised according to the Survey. Whatever else may be said, brand loyalty appears to be diminishing by the day.³

As David Wells has eloquently argued for the better part of the last 15 years the captivity of evangelicals to a consumer and therapeutic culture has been their primary undoing.⁴ It is the markets which have proven to be successful beyond our wildest imaginations and which has led in turn to the transformation of evangelical conviction by those very same markets. The domestication of religious conviction under the social pressures of the markets is the primary explanation of the continuing fragmentation and fracturing of religious believers. Individuals and individual congregations are embedded in structures of ubiquitous choices that undermine any real sense of belonging to a larger or more enduring community. Consider how many diverse individuals fill a normal email address book or how many “friends” are registered on the average Facebook account. Consider how many television channels fill diverse niches of interest today. Consider the vast number of diverse locations we are transported to every day via the Internet. These persistent diversities in our lives have the inevitable consequence of privileging diversity over unity in our collective consciousness and of privileging the individual over the community. It also makes enduring truths difficult to embrace. Peter Berger has recently written,


Bumping into so many “others” makes it difficult to suppose there is one overarching truth. It is not merely that our experience becomes fluid, but that reality itself appears to become fluid. If the central medium through which we experience life is the ever changing electronic image and word, why should we be surprised that fixed points are hard to find, most especially theologically fixed points. In the absence of these fixed points, individuals tend to migrate towards other individuals with common tastes and styles. It is experienced as a form of cultural organization based upon narrow concerns rooted in class, gender, region, religion, ethnicity, morality and ideology. Commentators often refer to this as the new tribalism. The threads binding the new tribe together are primarily private and personal, and are more easily swayed by the external pressures of the markets. It comes to our attention most especially in the clash of conflicts between the tribes. Those clashes we call the culture wars. But the wars are not merely between two large ideologically driven groups, conservatives and liberals, but between a myriad of narrow special interests carved out by the markets in a thousand different ways.

It is not surprising then that there is a deep disparity between the cultural commitment to diversity and the actual concrete lifestyles of homogeneity which most Americans inhabit. There is a very real disconnect between the descriptive diversity of contemporary culture and the actual homogeneity of the communities in which they experience day-to-day life. At a trivial level, we are conscious of the differences between Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, but part of what animates great sports rivalries is the unity of the respective rival communities. At a more substantive level, we experience the conflicts of the abortion debates as deep social divisions. Under the pressures of pluralization, we tend to socially migrate to safe havens of unity. Social conservatives tend to listen to socially conservative commentators. Social radicals tend to read other social radicals. We migrate towards homogenous communities as a response to the increase of diversity around us. The danger is that we consciously affirm democratic diversity while being thoroughly inoculated from it. The result is that we do not handle our differences very well.

Oldline/mainline Protestant churches often fostered theological pluralism as a means to protect freedom of conscience so important in the modern world. The consequence was that the ecclesial glue that held these churches together was little beyond a common commitment to be different. That has not proven to be enduring. By contrast evangelical churches and networks of evangelical congregations often promoted a unity built around common notions of devotional piety or common attractions to a peculiar preaching and worship style or a common place in the culture wars. The churches marketed these as lifestyle preferences, and inevitably opened themselves up to the vagaries of the markets. Individuals could (and did) move from church to church with all the ease of switching brands at the supermarket checkout counter. Individuals rarely felt loyal to communities over and above their own choices. It is then ironic that evangelicals, while looking warily at the pluralism of the present landscape of diverse denominations, failed to recognize the market orientation of the movement which encouraged a deeper and more insidious form of pluralism. It is a deeper form of pluralism precisely because it operates at the level of intuitions about ordinary life and it is more insidious because it marginalizes theological convictions about the gospel and the ecclesial commitments of a gospel community.

Democracy: Tradition or Anti-Tradition?

Democracy is an account of how we deal with our social conflicts. In that sense democracy is a form of governance in which the adult members of the society being governed all have some share in electing rulers and are free to speak their minds in a wide-ranging discussion that rulers are bound to take seriously. A consequence of this depiction is that all democratic citizens have natural rights to express whatever premises actually serve as reasons for their claims.⁶ The goal of democracy is the development of an overlapping consensus regarding the actual concrete conflicts of life together. This requires respect for others and the kind of exchange where each person’s deepest commitments can be recognized for what they are and assessed accordingly.

We experience democracy as a social polity of diversity. Given the amount of diversity in our lives, democracy is an integral part of our collective social consciousness. We are instinctively aware of the diverse number of voices in our cultural conversation. It is hard for us to imagine a world where there are only monochromatic renderings of opinion. We also take for granted a polity that intuitively shows respect towards others. We do not always live up to that goal, but we assume nonetheless that it is a goal worth having.


In this regard democracy is always a fragile polity, susceptible to other cultural vices. Democracy may rightly be said to supervene on other cultural institutions and thus opens itself to be captured by other social cultural forces. But the recognition of the fragility of democracy also leaves open the possibility of privileging confessional and liturgical traditions as the very means of interpreting and restraining the corruptibility of democracy. This is a highly contested claim among Christians today.

It is not an uncommon claim that democracy serves as a poorly conceived social polity for ecclesial identity. The primary theological critics of democracy in our time have questioned both its raw individualism and its rampant consumerism.⁸ If the markets fracture our ecclesial identity and thereby thin out religious conviction, democracy is often seen as a willing accomplice in the crime. In this sense, democracy is seen as undermining stable notions of theological conviction necessary to sustain an ecclesial identity. Mere instrumental notions of democracy surely open themselves up to this critique. In a social polity in which every individual is given voice, there may appear little room for the authoritative Word of God. In a social polity where nothing is fixed except the will of the people, there may appear little to pass on from one generation to the next. Democracy, on the surface seems to run against the grain of the traditional bonds of Divine authority by which the church gains its central identity. This is the nub of the criticism.

Undoubtedly this points at a very real danger, but we must remember that democracy can also serve to restrain unwarranted abuses of human tradition and authority as well. It can serve as a system of checks and balances by means of which those governed are not required to give blind obedience to those in authority. On this side of paradise, human corruption requires that we take seriously the possibility of abuse by those governing as well as those governed.

As a social polity democracy has historically “leaned” towards helping us keep governing authorities in check. When it has been set free from a theological and ethical framework it has also provided the stage for a rampant consumerism unleashed by the power of greed and envy. But we must not forget that democracy has proven somewhat successful as a social polity of conflict management. It has created social space in which diverse voices learn to respect each other. It has instilled habits and dare I say, traditions of dealing with our conflicts in peaceable fashion. These are always fragile habits and tenuous safeguards to be sure.

Reckoning that democracy is a tradition and not merely a revolt against tradition may itself serve as a reminder of the great promise of democracy if also of its potential for great danger. Its great promise lies precisely in its restraint of authoritarian abuses. Its great danger is the moral anarchy that emerges when democracy is freed from substantive notions of the common good. As a system of checks and balances, it guards against tyranny, but loosed from its moral underpinnings it opens up the door to the tyranny of individual choices.

Democracy ought to be handed down as a set of habits which respects the voices of others, including one’s own. It also ought to promote habits of humility about one’s own vested interests and the vested interests of others. It ought to inculcate certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in public discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of events with admiration, pity or horror. Construed as a tradition, democracy is not a mere instrumental social polity of diversity and tolerance. It is rather a social polity of the already-but-not-yet, where we recognize fixed notions of the common good, but also that our grasp of it is not yet fixed.

Understanding that democracy is a tradition, rather than a repudiation of tradition itself, is one of the means to temper its naïve social ideals. Democracy is our traditional way of dealing with our differences and deal with our differences we must. Not only do our core intuitions about the church compel us to wrestle with our differences, but the gospel itself is a polity of identity-in-difference which mandates that we learn to “live together peaceably”. Learning to live together requires that we walk a fine line, respecting the intrinsic dignity and rights of others, while also respecting the right to disagree with each other for the sake of the well being of the whole church. Democracy not situated as a tradition will inevitably swerve towards a naked individualism whose only goal is the securing of individual desires. Situating democracy as a tradition places it into part of a larger project for the well being of the church. That “larger project” has to do with protecting individual dignity against the abuse of authority. It is the project of learning to live together with our differences and construing those differences as the means of dealing with our unreconciled conflicts.

Deep ecclesial pluralism is against the will of God, but it is the human condition of our times. It is written into the script of our history. It will not somehow marvelously cease simply because we ignore it. It will also not vanish simply by affirming the invisible unity of the church. We ought to embrace those modest attempts aimed at resolving our conflicts, though we ought to be wary of immodest attempts that purport to be the final solution to all our differences on this side of paradise. As Martin Marty has quipped, “We should lay down arms and take up argument against each other”⁹ Even to do this will not be easy for it requires that we take our differences seriously enough to argue about them while also being hospitable enough towards each other that we can listen to the arguments.

The Protestant Reformation confessed against Rome that the Biblical mandate for the priesthood of all believers undermined all pretensions to infallible human authorities. They recognized the unique priestly dimensions to ecclesiastical authority in mediating the Divine Word to the rest of the church, but that mediation was never infallible. Those who spoke on behalf of God, must always be wary of confusing their own voice with the Divine Word inscripturated. Scripture was the final court of appeals. It was the final interpeter for all ecclesiastical claims as well. Guarding against the abuse of human authority was a mandate on this side of paradise by virtue of the very presence of the Divine Word.

Grounding democracy in the language of “individual rights” in the ecclesial square may well be unwise. Individuals have no rights that supercede the prerogatives of God. But in the ecclesial square individuals do have responsibilities towards each other grounded in the fact persons have God-given rights to be treated with respect and honor. The strong are to care for the weak, the rich have responsibilities for the poor, men and women are to mutually honor each other. The gospel driven responsibility to “reach across” these natural divisions of power and prestige in the New Testament echoes the Old Testament responsibility to care for the poor, the orphan and the widow. These mutual rights and responsibilities argue for democratic sensibilities in the ecclesial square grounded in that fundamental loyalty to the Living God. These democratic sensibilities unhinged from a theological account are all too often cashed out by the whims of the market and lead inevitably to the greater fracturing of the church.

Democracy and the History of Protestant Denominations

Reckoning with the power of democracy as a tradition permits the possibility of juxtaposing it within a wider set of theological traditions. The “tradition of democracy” in ecclesiology flourished because of the fundamental insights of the Reformation. There was no grand design to introduce a democratic polity by the emerging Protestant churches, but there can also be little doubt that the magisterial reformers thought it imperative that diverse people be given voice in the life of the church, as a hedge against the abuses of the papacy. It was not an unrestrained democracy of opinions, but a modified form of conciliarism in which authority in the church was dispersed. All of the central figures of the Reformation, held that ecclesial authority must be held in check by the Scriptures. Calvin was slightly stronger in his tone than Luther about the possibility of church counsels erring, but both were equally strong in their principled objections to the consolidation of authority into the hands of an ecclesial magesterium. It was not merely that the practice of the papacy needed reform, but that the monarchical centralization of power in the papacy ran counter to Scripture itself. There must be checks and balances on the exercise of authority in the church. Authority must be democratized and the democratic impulse must be restrained by the nature of the gospel.

The rise of Protestantism is obviously a socially and politically complex narrative to situate in early modern Europe. What must not be lost is the theological impulses that sustained the early Protestants. The Protestant churches of northern Europe quickly developed systems of checks and balances between the power exercised by the church and the power exercised by the State. They also put into place conciliar forms of ecclesial structure in which authority was never vested in the hands of a few. The Protestant churches saw themselves as a dissenting voice against the centralization of religious authority.

In the early modern period, denominations became the means to protect dissent while also remaining loyal to the larger social project of liberal democracies. The dissenting churches of England in the early 18th century. (Presbyterian, Baptist and Congregationalist) sought civil protection from the established Church of England while remaining loyal to the constitutional monarchy and the nascent democratic structures emerging in British society. They saw themselves as prophetic corrections to the state church too closely allied with political self-interest.

Denominations with rare exceptions in the West never viewed themselves as the “one true church”. They saw themselves as branches of the one true church removed from dominant control of governing authorities. This permitted and at times encouraged a wider confessional conversation among the various branches of the Protestant churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestants had a built-in structural context for dissent and reform. Undoubtedly there was also fertile soil for polarization between denominations. The failure to restrain polarization while sustaining contexts of dissent and reform has proven to be the central dynamic of church life in the contemporary era.

Under the increasing pluralization of the 20th century, denominations became all too fiercely independent of each other, and under the conditions of a consumer culture, they became fiercely protective of their “market share”. Churches developed internal cultures of market competition with each other. The evangelical churches in particular across the 20th century fiercely protected their independence from the establishment churches as the best means to avoid being domesticated by the establishment impulses. They often failed to see domestication coming from the opposite direction, viz., from the fiercely independent ethos of the consumer markets. The result was the inability of people in the pews to see any remnant of the visible unity of the gospel beyond local congregational life.

The dynamics of denominational identity underwent a significant shift through the middle decades of the 20th century. The major denominations on American soil divided along critical sociopolitical lines. These sorts of divisions split denominations into two parties, conservatives and liberals. Religious identity became more and more identified with one’s socio-political convictions. Religious conservatives and religious liberals were the two great parties of American religious life in the second half of the 20th century. These great culture war definitions had the unintended consequence of actually flattening out the differences among the denominations. Evangelical Presbyterians and evangelical Methodists were likely to see themselves as allies, and their liberal counterparts as foes. Charismatics and Dispensationalists were strange bedfellows on the conservative side of the culture wars, though they each sustained an internal culture war by which they could distinguish conservatives and liberals in their own circles. The increasing importance of the State during the period was reflected in the political template (liberal/conservative) being the primary framework defining church life. Even the formations of new denominations in the period tended to emerge either as conservative (far more frequently) or liberal (far less frequently) in the cultural space allowed. The rise of parachurch and non-denominational ministries in the middle decades of the 20th century did not escape the liberal/conservative divisions either. They simply reinforced the notion that religious people were more centrally identified by the political tradition they belonged to rather than any theological tradition grounded in a peculiar confession or liturgy. The difficulty of Roman Catholics to assimilate into the democratic culture through much of the 20th century was in part a function of their sense of belonging to a different sacred political order. So it continues with confessional Protestants in our day who seem oddly out of place on the liberal/conservative spectrum.¹⁰

We ought to realize that denominations are provisional representations of Christ’s body, not ideal ones. They are situated in an epoch in which centralized monarchical authority has been undermined and yet no alternative enduring conciliar structures have been put in place. For Protestants, papal authority has proven exegetically untenable but there has arisen no other viable means (yet) to sustain the unity-in-diversity characteristic of ecclesial identity in the New Testament. We live between the ecclesial times so to speak. In our current provisional state, we should not look for a common evangelical voice which artificially represents all of us and from which we all can speak, but rather learn the habits by which we can respect the voices we already have, and which represent the confessional and liturgical traditions in which we are embedded. It is in part the power of living traditions which enable us to take each other seriously, and not suppose that we must find our lowest common denominators as the best means to work for the unity of the church. Having the courage of our convictions to speak from within our traditions, and thereby to listen to others outside of our traditions is in fact the healthiest way to proceed.

Evangelicals and the Diversity of Traditions

Evangelicalism must understand its diverse theological traditions if it is to resist the temptation to meld them all into one ambiguous tradition with little doctrinal bite and even less traction against the spirit of the age. Evangelicals need to stand against the naked consumerist individualism, which marks out so much of the contemporary public square, save that evangelicals are too often naked consumerist individuals themselves. The evangelical traditions have something distinctive to offer the public square, if they can recognize their historical trajectories refracted through the democratic spirit but not captured by it. There are theologically reasons to suppose that the generosity of spirit which democracy might encourage has to be underwritten by a wider theological-ethical framework, which reside in the confessional and liturgical traditions of the Protestant Reformation. Without theological restraints, this generosity of spirit gets reduced to the sheer ambivalence of market choices. Democracy gets “filled in” by the markets in the life of the church.

David Wells has trenchantly argued that it is also impossible to resist the domestication of evangelical belief and behavior by supposing that one can belong to every tradition – or that all traditions could be sidestepped by belonging to one all-encompassing anti-tradition, viz. evangelicalism.¹¹ Evangelicalism is a collection of traditions. The theological character of these traditions too often get lost in the “lowest common denominator” approach of evangelicalism. By contrast, treating them with integrity may go some of the way towards dealing with our differences more honestly and generously.

A problem persists however. The sheer array of theological traditions represented in the evangelical context makes it difficult to discern the coherence of the gospel. Competing accounts of providence, of incarnation, of soteriology, of pnuematology and eschatology tempt us to suppose that doctrinal accounts are the problem, not the solution. The plurality of traditions within evangelicalism has brought with it the perception that the gospel itself is pluralized. “Denominationalism” is the term evangelicals often put on this besetting sin of our day. Conventional thinking among emergent evangelicals is that denominations belong to the modern age, but now that postmodernity has arrived, there is hope that the church can be freed from the fracturing of modern denominationalism.

Evangelical identity cuts across many denominations and in many instances outside of and against denominations. Its legacy in the postwar period defined it as a loose coalition of Protestant traditions firmly rooted in the legacy of the Reformation but also profoundly impacted by the Great Awakenings of the 18th and early 19th centuries and the battle with theological liberalism of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. Understanding the historical trajectory of the coalition ought to make us more not less interested in the distinctive theological voices of those trajectories. Leaving the Protestant shadow behind may seem like a church-uniting strategy to emergent evangelicals, but the reality is that without a recognition of the theological legacy, there will be inevitably be a thinning out of theological convictions unable to withstand the consumer barrage which far more seriously threatens the unity of the church. Recovering a theological voice that speaks into and against the pluralist impulse of the consumer culture requires a sufficiently concrete memory that cannot lose its Protestant moorings, even as it must wrestle with the distinctive challenges of its own day. Those Protestant moorings ought not be flattened into one pan-evangelical confession, nor ought they be so parochial as to undermine the robust conversation about their differences.

The denominations rooted in the magisterial Reformation have historically functioned not as the means of greater independence and fragmentation, but as concrete and enduring communities each committed to protecting the living tradition of the gospel. Denominations within the Reformation legacy have been the bearers of living traditions and their demise has been in part a function of the modern revolt against tradition and the postmodern suspicion of enduring truths.

Living traditions are those that sustain the enduring human goods of storied time, sacred space and communal identities.¹² These goods each suppose that belonging to a narrative larger than oneself, to a place where Divine and human action intersect and to a community of relationships is important to our well being, in large measure because we are wired this way by God. The reformation traditions protected the sacredness of time in the covenantal remembering of the narrative of redemption, the sacredness of space in the celebration of the real presence of Christ at the Lord’s Supper and the significance of community in gathering as a distinctive people called out by divine grace. In this they privileged time, space and community relative to the immediate concerns of life. In this their voices are desperately needed today.

Getting “beyond denominationalism” will likely exacerbate the deepening pluralization rather than serving as the solution to our present captivity to the fracturing intrinsic to the consumer markets. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the fracturing of Christianity in the present culture owes more to the freedom from diverse theological traditions than to the pluralizing effect of diverse denominational structures. Without supposing that denominations by themselves solve the problem, it is the case that denominations are not the root cause of the fragmentation of contemporary evangelical life. Quite the contrary. Belonging to one of the enduring traditions of the Reformation serves as a bulwark against the increasing irrelevance of religious belief brought on by the daily and ubiquitous choices of ordinary life. It serves as a restraints against those “religious shopping” which inevitably reshapes one’s religious identity by the vagaries of the market itself.

The denominations of the Reformation ought to be construed as concrete expressions of enduring theological traditions. Denominations as concrete theological traditions provide ways to be bound with others who are defined by a theological articulation of the gospel, which has endured across generations. They are not the only expressions of enduring theological traditions, but they are the primary expression in the evangelical context. Denominations serve to situate people in living communities connected across local congregations and as theological traditions, they resist being defined by the contemporary moment. Undoubtedly denominations can get “frozen” in an earlier period of religious conflict, dangerously susceptible to authoritarian renderings of the tradition. In these cases, the cultural ethos of an earlier time can serve as the eschatological high point from which all future eras appear as but a declension. This reality may be present in a few denominations and in a subset of its congregations, but rare is church life today experienced as simple repristination of the past. Far more frequent among evangelicals is the theological amnesia, which characterizes our overly commodified religious life. It is that theological amnesia, which in turn leads to greater, not lesser fragmentation.

To speak of a theological tradition in the abstract will of necessity be distorting. There are no “abstract” theological traditions. There are only living concrete traditions, some which may well be adaptive and others less adaptive to the changing cultural climate. Denominations are susceptible to an inward looking ethos, whose primary concerns are their own survival. This is however not unique to denominations, but to any concrete community. What is distinctive about the denominations whose legacy lies in the Reformation are the distinctive theological articulations of the gospel at the center of their enduring memories. As is true of every generation, those memories can be lost, but losing them is a sign not of imminent unification of the church, but rather to the impending loss of the gospel itself.

Belonging to a church tradition will be accompanied by a theological rendering of the gospel (a confession), which also contains implicit and explicit habits of ecclesial identity by which members understand what it means to “belong”. These may have to do with principles of interpretation, models of contextualization, common hymnody, mission strategy, pastoral training, ecumenical relations, historical controversies, etc. This is different from affirming a small list of essential doctrines while agreeing that every other issue is a matter of style. They will not endure with merely a minimal list of essential doctrines. Living traditions must incarnate the creed with life, which then requires a much more robust ecclesial identity than a small list could provide.

The Unity of the Church and the Logic of the Gospel

Many evangelicals have rightly realized the urgency of wrestling with the unity of the church in the contemporary context. They have been slower to realize that the unity of the church is part of the logic of the gospel. In part this was owing to the outside forces constraining the movement across the 20th century. The demise of Protestant ecumenism in the first half of the 20th century seemed to divert the attention of evangelicals away from the unity of the church towards the growth of the church. In the post-war boom of the market economy, there arose an almost endless discussion of strategies and techniques in local churches by evangelicals. This meant attention was diverted from theological articulations of gospel (against the challenges of Protestant liberalism) to the growth and expansion of the church. The irony is that the church largely stopped growing in the very places where such rabid attention was given to its growth. Conservative churches may have grown at the expense of their liberal counterparts, but the size of the explicitly Christian population in America stayed relatively stable throughout the 20th century. It may not have declined as did the churches in Western Europe and the explanations for this are undoubtedly complex. Surprisingly evangelical-like churches appeared to be exploding in the global south where there was virtually no attention paid to the techniques of church growth. The church in the global south grew because the gospel in all its concrete and practical depth was central and because the gospel is sturdy in the face of great suffering and oppression.¹³

These unexpected global realities have refocused the discussion of the church in the West back to foundational questions of identity – what is the church and how is that diverse churches are to express a common identity? This discussion has become familiar around the concept of the missional church. Deeply influenced by the work of Lesslie Newbigin, this conversation has urged upon us the realization that the church must understand its peculiar identity in the world as theological. The church gains its very essence in so far as its mission is seen as a dimension of the mission of God in the world. As a result the church reflects the unity-in-diversity of the Trinitarian God who enacts redemption through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is this peculiar sacred wisdom by which the church gains its identity, necessarily so because the gospel itself defines the church.

One important proviso at this point. The mission of the church does not strictly equate to the mission of God. Unlike God, the church must draw attention to its own shortcomings and idolatries while recognizing the gospel as its central identifying mark. Our ecclesial communities are fallen and the gospel to which they testify is the most pungent reminder of this. Churches unable to testify to their own flaws inevitably express a self-righteousness which is the very antithesis of the gospel. These churches will also appear hypocritical to their surrounding neighbors in the ecclesial square.

If the mission of God is not strictly equivalent with the mission of the church, then the Trinitarian unity of the divine community cannot serve as the sole conceptual resource for the unity of the church. The unity-in-diversity of the divine community need not account for the will to power so prevalent in the human heart and in human institutions. In other words, the diversity of the divine community is not a conflicted diversity as is the case with any/all human communities in our present condition. We must also be careful of the utopian pretensions of Christian communities, which often grow from a over-reliance on the Trinitarian analogy.

The Trinitarian analogy however does provide conceptual resources to talk about the common goods beyond mere individual actions. As the Father loves the Son, so we are to love one another. As the Son sacrifices his will for the will of his Father, so we are to be servants one of each other. The Spirit delights in glorifying the Son, so we are to delight in the well-being of others. In this conceptual space of the Trinitarian reflection in the church, the democratic impulse has an appropriate set of restraints. Expressing one’s will find its well being in the service of others, rather than as an end in its own right. In the ecclesial community, the corruptions of persons demands the restraint provided by the voice of other persons, but the diversity of voices is also restrained by a notion of the common good manifest for us most clearly in the acts of the Divine persons towards each other. The persons of the Godhead express their diverse identities for the sake of their love for the others. Raising the spectre of democracy against the backdrop of the Trinity, calls attention to the need to think of equality of the Divine persons and the manner in which each is fully invested in the other. There is no conflict of wills in the Godhead, neither is there any will to power that must be kept in check. But there is an equality of persons in the Godhead, which must be part of framing any discussion of the democratic impulse in the ecclesial square. The church ought to reflect the equality of persons, if only imperfectly and provisionally, not by diminishing its differences, but treating diverse persons with respect even it means respectfully disagreeing.

The manner in which we ought to deal with diversity inside the ecclesial square is more squarely rooted in the logic of the gospel than the logic of the Divine community. That is to say the logic of the gospel has a sacred wisdom in dealing with internal diversity. The reconciling work of the gospel contains impulses, which take corruption seriously, given in the hearts of individuals and the lives of communities. The gospel restrains the temptations towards self-righteousness found in the abuse of authority as well as the independence from all authority. Inside the sacred wisdom of the gospel, the democratic impulse is the restraint upon the self-righteous ethos that too often attends those in authority. Inhabiting a theological tradition also ought to temper the uninhibited choosing unleashed by the democratic impulse.

Inside the church democracy begs for a theological account of individuals and the ties that bind them together. Democracy as theologically-interpreted category, rather than merely political or economic categories, demands a wider narrative. There are no such things as bare democracies. Democracy intuitively distrusts the concentration of power, but it also permits substantive discussion of the common good, which is threatened by the concentration of power or the anarchy of individualism. That theological common good is the communal orientation to the Living God. There may be a host of other goods, which the church protects, but it is the central good of its covenantal with the Living God, which makes it always vigilant against the abuse of all human authority and the autonomy of unfettered human will.

The first ecumenical counsel in Acts 15 manifested theological checks and balances inherent in the gospel in order that the Gentiles would not be excluded. However one construes the structures of authority in the Jerusalem council, it is clear that theologically-informed democratic impulses were operative in the deliberations of the body gathered.

Peculiar to the gospel is the embrace of diverse tribes, races and cultures, all because Christ is our peace who has “broken down the dividing wall of hostility”. The gospel is expressed in the church as the reconciliation of estranged parties because they belong to the same Lord. At the heart of the gospel is not the overcoming of diversity, but the reconciling impulse in dealing with “strangers”. Reconciliation is the goal because we experience reconciliation with God in and through the gospel. Reconciliation does not obliterate the differences between strangers. God is still God and we are still creatures after reconciliation has been effected by the gospel. As a result of the gospel we learn to interpret those differences in different ways.

The power of the Living Word defines this new reality between strangers in the church. It is the power of the Gospel proclaimed in word and deed by which God effects the new status in which strangers are now justified together. They no longer share a common death sentence, but rather share in the inheritance of the new heavens and the new earth. It is the forensic character of the Gospel in which the adoption papers take on legally binding status, which unites into one family formerly diverse orphans. The adopted orphans do not cease to be strangers in some sense to each other, though they now belong to a common family. They also bring their own unique strengths and weaknesses into the family.

The reconciling impulse is also manifest in the sharing of one baptism. Strangers are grafted into a common mega-narrative of redemption in baptism though their own peculiar micro-narratives are not destroyed. They share a common (redemptive) history by means of which in baptism they now belong to a peculiar covenant people though they have not thereby lost their connection to their own particular tribe and clan. Neither can their entrance into the new covenant community come except through the concreteness of belonging to a specific concrete subset of that community – the local church. So we are not baptized as Reformed or Methodist or Baptists but rather as Christians who belong to specific traditions.

That reconciling impulse in the church is manifest in the sharing of the Lord’s Supper. We share a common meal. We break bread together. We are brought into the renewing work of Christ by the same Spirit. Yet it remains fundamentally true that we have not lost our distinctive concrete human identities in the sharing of the meal. We speak diverse languages before and after the Supper. We do not cease to be geographically located in diverse cultures before and after the Supper. We also do not cease to be Lutheran or Anglican or Presbyterian after the Supper, though we confess the supper not as a Lutheran meal, nor an Anglican meal nor a Presbyterian meal.

Where then should we turn to settle the conflicts of our ecclesial square? It is no answer to say that we’ll simply permit the ecclesial square to continue towards the course of yet greater alienation and arbitrariness, nor naively suppose our differences will be overcome by forgetting them. For good or ill, the first step is to recognize this is our plight and as Christians it is not ours to escape. The diverse churches are to live as faithful witnesses in and with the ecclesial square. It is not a realistic option to suppose fundamental conflicts are going to be solved anytime soon. We must begin to cultivate the desire to live together in, with and through our differences. The animating vision of the gospel calls persons of diverse traditions to live together in truth and love, learning to talk with each other and slowly altering and deepening their traditions in response to that conversation.

A principled and pluralistic ecclesial square is the only option beside oppression or anarchy available to us today. As Protestant Christians we can either retreat from this wider conversation, seek to dominate it, or learn to live with it wisely. Undoubtedly there are many evangelicals today wary about the fracturing of the movement. They are rightfully fearful of its witness to the watching world. They are wary of engaging yet another generation of partisan culture wars. But we will ignore our theological differences at our own peril, and to the greater fracturing of the church.

The church must engage the ecclesial world of diversity on the terms of the gospel rather than the terms of the conventional wisdom of our culture. Dealing with diversity requires humility and wisdom. It requires a vigilance against resentment and cynicism. It requires a generosity of spirit and a depth of conviction. It requires us to speak prophetically with the resources of our tradition while recognizing our own vested interests in those traditions.

We must engage and not merely tolerate diversity in the ecclesial square. The conflicts of a fractured ecclesial polity lie not with keeping emotional distance from those with whom we have fundamental disagreements. It comes rather in the radically counter-intuitive claim that we show hospitality to those with whom we have deep disagreements.¹⁴ We invite the outsider into the common wisdom of our tradition, recognizing that we share the sacred wisdom of the gospel, even if we articulate differently. We take their ideas seriously not primarily to overthrow their ideas, but rather with the expectation that wisdom is found in the strangest of places, even among those who disagree with us.

Changing the ethos of our ecclesial identity may well require that we think of the commitment to our tradition less in terms of defeating an enemy and more in terms of showing hospitality to the stranger. Without a home (tradition) there is no place to invite the stranger into. A traditionless Christian is indeed a person without a home. But a tradition construed as a fortress is a most inhospitable place for strangers as well. Our desire is not merely to have a seat at the ecclesial table, but to prepare the meal at the table, which the stranger will find curiously satisfying. It is a call to invite the stranger into our tradition as a radical act of hospitality. If the meal is satisfying to the stranger, it is not because we have prepared the meal but rather that the food itself nourishes the soul. And in turn we may be invited into the stranger’s tradition and taste some of its delicacies.

Is not the analogy with the Lord’s Supper close at hand? The Lord invites us to His table as an expression of our reconciliation to Him in the gospel. The result is that this reconciliation spills over into our relationship with others. We bear responsibilities to each other because we have shared the Lord’s Supper together. It reminds us that it is the Lord’s Supper, not Athanasius’, not Augustine’s, not Luther’s, not Calvin’s, not Wesley’s.

The analogy of sharing our tradition with others opens us to the radical act of hospitality at the heart of the gospel itself. A tradition embedded in the gospel is finally not our tradition at all. It is something to which we belong rather than it belonging to us. And we only belong to it insofar as it incorporates us into the faith delivered once and all to the saints.

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Endnotes
¹J.I. Packer makes the claim that evangelicals have so strongly emphasized the individual aspects of soteriology, that they have almost of necessity neglected the corporate dimensions of the doxological context of soteriology.  Evangelicals may believe in the church, but their actual practice diminishes the importance of churchliness as part of the Christian life. See his, “On Ecclesiology” in Christopher Hall and Kenneth Tanner, eds., Ancient & Postmodern Christianity: Paleo-Orthodoxy in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Thomas C. Oden  (Downers Grove, Ill. : InterVarsity Press, 2002) 120-128.
²In The Heretical Imperative (Doubleday and Co., 1979).
³See “Brand Disloyalty: America is a Nation of Spiritual Shoppers” The Economist, Feb 28, 2008 Print Edition. 
⁴It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the domestication of evangelical churches by the consumer and therapeutic culture is the glue that holds together the five volumes in his theology and culture series: No Place for Truth (Eerdmans 1993), God in the Wasteland (Eerdmans 1994), Losing Our Virtue (Eerdmans 1998), Above All Earthly Powers (Eerdmans, 2005) and The Courage to Be Protestant (Eerdmans, 2008)
⁵“Secularization Falsified” in First Things, Feb 2008, 23.
⁶Here and in what follows I am following Jeff Stout’s portrayal of democracy as a tradition rooted in common notions of virtue and vice. See his, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
⁷Stout, 7.
⁸Two important critics are Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank. See Hauerwas, A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000) and Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
⁹When Faiths Collide (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 90.
¹⁰D.G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. (Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002) argues for a “third way” to configure Protestants who do not fit on the liberal/conservative spectrum. Hart makes the intriguing suggestion that pietism is the common heritage of churches defined by the liberal/conservative framework, since pietism privileges religious experience and thus abandons the public spheres of life to a secular rationality. The captivity of the evangelical churches to technique and entertainment is but one evidence of this “secular rationality” run amuck when churches privatize religious conviction.
¹¹The Courage to Be Protestant (Eerdmans, 2007)
¹²I am here borrowing from Albert Borgmann, “Traditional Culture and Global Commodification” (unpublished paper presented at a forum on Religion and Technology, Boston Theological Institute, February 2008).  The background to Borgmann’s depiction of the intersection of technology and tradition can be found in his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; 5th printing 1997).
¹³Philip Jenkins has notably written, “Whatever Europeans or North Americans may believe, Christianity is doing very well indeed in the global South - not just surviving but expanding” in The Next Christendom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
¹⁴Martin Marty, When Faiths Collide (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) extends this suggestion at great length as a prophetic call to Christian churches to engage global diversity on distinctively Christian terms.