http://www.adventbirmingham.com/advent/articles.asp?ID=1483 Low-Church and Proud by Paul F.M. Zahl [Ed. note: This is chapter eight of a new anthology entitled Evangelical Ecclesiology - Reality or Illusion? edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., and published by Baker Academic.] As an evangelical and Protestant Episcopalian, I wonder about the attraction that high-church ecclesiologies have for many of my evangelical sisters and brothers on the free church side. It is a strange feeling to observe the magnetic attraction that sacramental catholicism has for many in the evangelical community in North America. It is especially strange when one has been fighting a defensive action for thirty years against a triumphant "liberal catholicism" in the Episcopal Church (ECUSA). By "liberal catholicism" I mean a version of Christianity that is catholic superficially – i.e., it looks catholic-but liberal ethically and theologically – i.e., long on modernity and pluriformity but short on the Bible. It is disturbing, in other words, when Bible conservatives fall for chasubles, smells, and hierarchy. It seems like a reaction to something that was missing or kinked in childhood, a compensation to make up for an earlier loss. I am just a little too skeptical of forms and (endlessly revised) prayer books and bishops and words such as unity and semper. When the Canterbury Trail started being forged in the 1970s, I wanted to put my hand up and say, "Been there. Done that. It's not what you think. It's form without substance, Schein without Sein. All that glitters is not gold." I used to say, in cautioning evangelical Christians who were compulsively attracted-or so it seemed-to high-church ecclesiology, "If this is what you really want, why not go all the way? Why not convert to the Church of Rome? Pull a Cardinal Newman. Be consistent. Go all the way." Many have done so, in fact. Many have "poped," as we used to say. Many, however, have not. Many are still standing on the brink, seeking to "force" Anglicanism and Lutheranism and even variants of Orthodoxy to be both evangelical and catholic. For myself, both a systematic theologian by training and an Episcopal cathedral dean by day, I cannot be both. I cannot be Protestant and Catholic. I cannot be evangelical and ecclesiologically "high." A house divided cannot stand. It has to fall. It always does. All this is to say that Roger E. Olson's essay is a breath of fresh air for all evangelicals who are thinking about "church." It is Olson's essay that I wish to affirm and perhaps even extend. Again, I write as an Episcopalian who is okay with labels: low-church, Protestant, and evangelical, with a pinch of charismatic. Evangelical Christianity is by nature low-church. This is because, for evangelicals, "ecclesiology and especially polity are secondary to the gospel itself" (Olson). I don't see how this axiom can be denied. The gospel message of the forgiveness of sins and the new being in Christ is addressed, in every case at the start, to ah individual. No one hears collectively. It just doesn't happen. As a parish minister for thirty years, I have never met a person who actually hears collectively. We hear individually, at least in the first instance. Of course, I observe that Christian people in their growing integration of heart, mind, and especially will often come to appreciate social and political notes in the sound. But given the pain and losses and crimes of the heart, people hear the Word as a word to them individually. So right off the bat, our approach to a listener cannot be ecclesiological. Moreover, the sanctifying Word is, for Reformation Anglicans and Lutherans, at least, the justifying Word addressed to new areas of our sinfulness-the unevangelized dark continents of the human heart. The sanctifying Word is heard primarily as a word to inhering, continuing sin. Because we are always in this life both saved and sinner, loved and human, the conflicts within our character and temperament require a concrete, specific word. In short, we are not addressed collectively by the gospel. Only people do that – people who are thinking abstractly or who see us in categories. Olson understands what more and more evangelical Anglicans are beginning to wake up to. When our high-church brothers and sisters chastise us for having no ecclesiology, the right response is, "We have an ecclesiology, but it is not your ecclesiology. We have a low ecclesiology. We have a high Christology and a high soteriology but a low ecclesiology. Why should we feel defensive about that? Ecclesiology is important, yes. It is certainly interesting. But it is not saving. If you think ecclesiology is saving, then become a Roman Catholic. Don't become an Episcopalian. Don't become a high-church anything unless you wish to swallow the whole loaf: Become a Roman Catholic." The Canterbury Trail is a schizoid path to walk. I would be surprised if many of the free church evangelicals who have walked it will still be on it by 2020. My axiom is: "Evangelical" has to be translated, among other things, as low-church. This is the core point of Olson's essay: "The free church tradition regards itself as consistent Protestantism" (Olson's emphasis). The other essays in this book are all tied into this issue. Are evangelicals consistently free church in polity, or is the trend to ecclesiology a necessary correction? Bruce Hindmarsh confirms Olson's view and argues that" early modem evangelicalism displayed an unprecedented transdenominational and international ecclesial consciousness that was characterized by an unparalleled subordination of church order to evangelical piety." How can the facts of history be interpreted otherwise? What Hindmarsh observes did actually happen. It happens today. Christianity breaks down the barriers and reduces all churchmanships to secondary status. Howard A. Snyder's piece is interesting and narrative, but is it correct? Is it correct that the four classical marks of the church are una, sancta, catholica, and apostolica? Not according to the Reformation understanding, as also expressed in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles. There we read that the marks of the church are its preaching of the pure Word of God and the faithful administration of the two sacraments. The Reformed add a third note: church discipline. But these are not the four so-called classics. They, the four Latin adjectives, only got the church into the apostate mess it was in. So Snyder's paradigm is flawed, at least to me. George R. Hunsberger's pumping for missional ecclesiology is great. It may be "one note," but what a true and right note it is! Edith M. Humphrey's and Kerry L. Dearborn's pieces hit a different note. I believe I understand where Humphrey is corning from and do wish that her sacramental aspirations for the Christian, and also the evangelical Christian, church could be achieved within Anglicanism. But I doubt it. Evangelical people who respond to the Episcopal Church's apparent objectivity and verticality are responding to something proper and biblical. But a closer look-and I know it well-discloses not consistent catholicism but rather liberal catholicism. And liberal catholicism rarely satisfies, because it is a construct for people to have their cake and eat it too. Liberal catholicism cannot stand. Liberal views of authority and Scripture and cultural rapprochement do not finally cohere with a historic, catholic view of the church. The Church of Rome's history renders this point beyond dispute. So Humphrey wants Anglicanism to be something it cannot be. Just spend some time, any amount of time, serving within a conventional Episcopal diocese, at least in North America. Bible-anchored evangelicals are bound to be disappointed. I can almost guarantee that. While Humphrey writes with high hopes, which I admire, Dearborn's essay is a fully realized abstraction. Only this essay, of all the essays, seems to be coming from an unreal world. Celtic spirituality is a notorious wax nose! Why is that? Because no one really knows anything absolutely verifiable about it. The sources for Celtic Christianity are extremely limited. A great deal of what we think Celtic Christians felt and taught and prayed are figments of nineteenth-century imagination. Yes, there are some elements in the archaeological record that seem to bear comparison with New Age thinking, yin/yang, complementarity and "weavings," nonhierarchical views of women and men, and so on. But I know the Irish! St. Patrick himself was a wild man. He was a wonderful wild man. And he was also devastating, iconoclastic, and polemical. Dearborn is making much more of Celtic spirituality than the actual sources admit. I know this pattern. It has happened for almost a century now \\rithin the liturgical moven1.ent in respect to Hippolytus. Everyone cites Hippolytus. The fact is that the Hippolytus source is weak and thin and very possibly heretical. Please don't base an ecclesiology on the slim pickings of Celtic spirituality. A little orange, please! I wish I could have been physically present at the Regent College ecclesiology conference. I wish I could have been there, even as a conflicted but more or less lifelong Episcopalian, to applaud Roger Olson. The point is, too much ecclesiology always turns to Christology-lite, soteriology-lite, gospel-lite. I wish to resist that. The Rev. Charles A. Collins, Jr., S.B.R., M.Div. Hospice Chaplain 289 Hastings Dr. Goose Creek, SC 29445 Home: (843) 832-6408 Office: (843) 554-4048 E-mail: evanglican@... Weblog: http://www.palmettoanglican.blogspot.com/ "If there were any word of God beside the Scripture, we could never be certain of God's Word; and if we be uncertain of God's Word, the devil might bring in among us a new word, a new doctrine, a new faith, a new church, a new god, yea himself to be a god. If the Church and the Christian faith did not stay itself upon the Word of God certain, as upon a sure and strong foundation, no man could know whether he had a right faith, and whether he were in the true Church of Christ, or in the synagogue of Satan."-- Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Reformer and Martyr _________________________________________________________________ Send a QuickGreet with MSN Messenger http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/cdp_games