“All God’s People: A Theology of the Church,” by David L. Smith (BridgePoint Books, 487 pp., $22.99, hardcover); “The Church,” by Edmund P. Clowney (InterVarsity, 336 pp., $14.99, paper); “What on Earth Is the Church? An Exploration in New Testament Theology,” by Kevin Giles (InterVarsity, 319 pp., $16.99, paper). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, a frequent contributor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, who formerly served on the staff of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Four years ago, Nathan Hatch, now provost of the University of Notre Dame, likened the legacy of modern evangelicalism to the altered landscape he had observed on a recent visit to Columbia, South Carolina, his hometown. In the 1950s, Columbia lacked fast-food restaurants and shopping malls; it also lacked the wildly proliferating parachurch organizations that evangelicals have pioneered and now take for granted.
As Hatch recalled, the religious landscape of Columbia “B.E.” (before evangelicalism) was dominated by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian steeples that graced almost every corner, reflecting the dominance of the organized church in Christian witness and nurture. Conceding that the institutional churches did not always exercise their market control responsibly, Hatch suggested that in breaking that ecclesiastical monopoly and replacing it with a consumer-driven ministry marketplace, evangelicals have inadvertently created a new set of problems. If evangelicalism has performed wonders in creating a thriving subculture of Christian this and Christian that, its legacy vis-a-vis “the church” is an altogether different story.
However the story is told, evangelicals are confused over the meaning of what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the holy catholic church.” The consequences of their reluctance to embrace the church as anything more than an invisible fellowship of believers are many. Hand in hand with a personal faith cut off from the past and unaccountable to anyone in the present, that ecclesiastical ambivalence has contributed to “defections” of favorite sons of prominent evangelical families, like Thomas Howard and Frank Schaeffer, to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. It has also contributed to the politicizing of the cause of Christ, as evangelicals, failing to differentiate the roles of the institutional church and individual believers, have entered the public arena not as individuals seeking common grace with other citizens, but in cohort with each other under the banner of Christ. Perhaps most serious, the neglect of the corporate dimension of the Christian faith has done little to reverse the declining status and health of churches in the United States, many already crippled by theological decay, at the dawn of a new century.
Sensitive to these shortcomings, three pastor-scholars, each representing a different denomination and each from a different country in the English-speaking world, have recently written books that seek to lead evangelicals to a healthier and more responsible understanding of the church. David L. Smith, a Canadian Baptist minister and academic dean of Providence Theological Seminary (formerly Winnipeg Bible College and Theological Seminary) in Manitoba, provides a general introduction to ecclesiology along historical, biblical, and theological lines in “All God’s People.” South of the border, Edmund P. Clowney, a Presbyterian minister in the United States, charter CHRISTIANITY TODAY columnist, and president emeritus of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, has written “The Church,” a primer with a greater theological focus and often a more thorough examination of contested matters than Smith’s. And Kevin Giles, an Anglican priest in Australia and consultant theologian for World Vision Australia, directly tackles a host of what he considers misguided evangelical notions about the church by appealing to a careful analysis of New Testament text and theology in “What on Earth Is the Church?”
THE ANGLICAN DOWN UNDER
Kevin Giles contends that an individualistic, or what he calls the “congregational” theory of the church (not to be confused with historic Congregationalism or congregational polity) shared by many evangelicals, is a product not of Scripture but of Western culture run amok: “To suggest that the Bible is ultimately about individual salvation, or that the church is but a local assembly of individuals who are bound together only by their personal associations, or that each individual congregation is in no profound way linked with other congregations, introduces ideas alien to biblical thinking.” Such a theory is inherently utilitarian, assessing the value of “the local church” only in terms of helping converts live out their faith, and assessing no value to the larger church, because she in no way helps the individual except perhaps as a platonic ideal of a heavenly, invisible fellowship of all believers throughout history.
Giles views the church as revealed in the New Testament organically, as the Christian community called into existence by Christ, representing a spiritual reality greater than the sum of its members and not just incidental, but fundamental, to being a Christian. He illustrates how Paul and Luke use church to designate sometimes the worldwide community of Christians, sometimes the community of Christians in one location, and sometimes the community of those who met in a home. While not denying her heavenly dimension, the New Testament posits the church primarily as a visible community on earth in contrast to her Lord, who lives in heaven, bearing witness in the world to the divine community that exists in the heavens.
Giles entertains no illusions of recapturing a supposedly pristine New Testament church pattern in a world far removed from the Roman Empire, a dream that unites such strange bedfellows as Restorationists, Pentecostals and charismatics, and the Plymouth Brethren.
Sensitive to the historical dimension of theology, he reveals how the Lord did not call together a community with static forms but one in sociological transition from the beginning. Giles then traces the process of institutionalization from the Book of Acts and Paul’s early letters, which reveal the church as a temporary fellowship waiting for the Lord’s return where every member exercised his spiritual gift, to Paul’s pastoral epistles, which picture the church as a more permanent, ongoing reality and highlight the role of appointed officers while restricting women from some offices.
To Giles, the church cannot be divorced from history: “In its essential nature, the Christian community is both a theological entity and a sociological and institutional entity existing in space and time.” Her forms will vary, whether modeled on the Roman provincial government after Constantine or emerging nation states after the Reformation, or as denominations reflecting the pluralism and bureaucratic structures of modern life. Aware that tensions from that mix will never be resolved this side of eternity, Giles expounds a “provisional” ecclesiology sensitive to the “possibilities and pitfalls of church life as it is manifested at any given time-a theology that neither denies the theological validity of the sociological form of the church, nor endorses it without any theological critique.”
THE YANKEE PRESBYTERIAN
Giles the Australian would be pleased, no doubt, that the more systematic treatments by North Americans Edmund Clowney and David Smith also register objections, in varying degrees, to evangelical notions of the church. Clowney’s vision in “The Church” clearly extends beyond the horizon of the local church and the “individualism that sees the church as a voluntary club for the converted.” Calling for a “deep biblical sense of the corporate identity of the new people of God,” Clowney grounds his volume in a Trinitarian perspective on the biblical doctrine of the church, from which he considers her characteristics, her service to God and humanity, and her structure.
While the Reformed tradition guides his pen, the retired seminary president’s catholicity shines from the opening chapters as he frames an understanding of the church according to the progressive revelation of God in Scripture that parallels the emphases of different ecclesiastical traditions. A revision of Clowney’s 1969 book, “The Doctrine of the Church,” these chapters trace God’s calling of Israel to be “the people of God” in the Old Testament, a theme favored by Reformed churches; Jesus’ transformation of that people into a church representing “the body of Christ,” a motif stressed in liturgical communions; and the Holy Ghost’s descent following Christ’s ascension to empower “a fellowship of the Spirit,” the model that inspires Pentecostals.
Of the three authors, only this Yankee Presbyterian addresses the vexing problems created by the theological pluralism of mainline Protestantism and a not-unrelated phenomenon, the modern parachurch enterprise. Noting that the Reformation “marks” of the church (in Calvin’s formulation, “the word of God purely preached and heard and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution”) are obscured or lacking in both, he warns of the precarious situation in denominations like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which since 1967 has not required officers to affirm the authority of Scripture or subscribe to any church creed. Borrowing Calvin’s figure, Clowney describes such confessional and constitutional changes as holding “a knife to the throat of the church.”
He sees the parachurch paradigm as less problematic. While crediting dispensationalism and a focus on the “invisible church” with reinforcing the parachurch impulse, he finds much to commend in parachurch ministries, a surprising concession considering his roots in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. As long as their limitations are recognized, parachurch ministries compensate where churches have dropped the ball and provide a fuller expression to the body of Christ than a single denomination. Seeing them as something akin to lay orders, Clowney believes the creation of more, not fewer, parachurch entities is a sign of a healthy Christian community.
After discussing the ministry of the church, Clowney explores church-state relations, urging caution at a time when Christians can be seduced into waging a culture war without reflection. He warns of the dangers of using “political weapons of the world to fight the spiritual battle of the kingdom.” While conceding that the church in her official capacity has a limited role–through the ministry of the Word–in drawing attention to the ethical questions that underlie political issues and assisting members in the analysis of matters political, he claims the Bible gives no warrant for the formation of an exclusively Christian political party or any such association that brokers influence in the name of Christ. Individual believers can and should, however, pursue political objectives with unbelievers concerned for life, liberty, and the restraint of violence, being careful not to confuse proper civil concerns with “the goals of faith and holiness that Christ appointed for his kingdom.”
THE DOMINION BAPTIST
In “All God’s People,” David Smith flies over the same territory as Clowney, but on a Baptist plane. His work is substantially longer, chiefly due to the addition of a historical review of ecclesiology from the early church to the present. And his approach is intentionally more of a survey, a “big-tent” inclusion of all the major points, parties, and people, whom he represents fairly and graciously.
Smith’s preference for congregational polity with its focus on the local church does not at all blind him to the weaknesses in evangelical thinking exposed by Giles and Clowney. As the title “All God’s People” suggests, Smith challenges evangelicals to become more acquainted with all God’s people, including not just Protestants in North America, but expressions of the church through history and around the globe, including Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. He also seconds Giles’s motion to conceive of “the local church” not simply as one congregation but all the congregations in a given locality, even advising the formation of a transdenominational council of elders representing each congregation.
This Dominion Baptist also understands that any particular church represents something more than an aggregate of justified sinners. The believer who joins the church and is initiated into her fellowship, he says, becomes organically united with the body of Christ, a reality the unbaptized cannot experience. In fact, Smith advances a spin on baptism rare among Baptists. “It would be a serious error to think of baptism as ‘merely symbolic.’ For Paul, what baptism symbolizes really occurs, and it occurs through the ordinance of baptism.” In addition, he interprets Galatians 3 as teaching that the believer becomes an adopted son of God “in faith” through baptism, and 1 Corinthians 12:13 as teaching that one receives the Spirit when initiated into the church: “In baptism, the Holy Spirit not only fuses believers into the church, but He indwells each individual Christian.”
Smith defends the Baptist practice of delaying the baptism of the children of believers until they can articulate faith in Christ, but he misses the opportunity to advance this old debate by avoiding an exploration, from a Baptist angle, of the relationship of children to the church. As a result, those anticipating an overdue evaluation of the practice of “dedicating” infants, now widely accepted by many evangelical churches, will need to look elsewhere.
COMMON THREADS
Among the common threads woven through these books, one cannot miss the gracious openness toward Roman Catholic scholarship. This ecumenical vision, very much in the spirit of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, signals a marked change from just a generation ago, when many Protestants considered the election of a Roman Catholic to the U.S. presidency a crisis.
Further, the spirit of the charismatic movement indwells these books, expressing a united petition for the exercising of spiritual gifts of every believer and a rethinking of the traditional clergy/laity distinction. Giles seeks a charismatic, every-member ministry patterned after the dynamic, communal relations within the Trinity expressing equal dignity and respect for all. Clowney speaks of every member being commissioned and installed by baptism to a “general office” of ministry, equipped and nurtured by others recognized for “special office”; Smith makes a similar distinction between “fundamental ministry” and “specialized ministry.”
Given this emphasis on every-member ministry, all three authors are obliged to address the status of women in the church. Smith appeals to Galatians 3:28 to affirm the full equality of women in ministry and leadership, where Clowney offers a defense of restricting the office of elder to men. But he boldly challenges the restrictive polity of his own communion, the Presbyterian Church in America, calling for women deacons and suggesting the diaconate today should recover the more prominent role it played in the early church. Giles’s limited discussion reflects an egalitarianism based on an appeal to the Trinitarian relations. Ironically, his egalitarianism may be intrinsic to the very individualism his book assails.
In addition, all three churchmen struggle with the visible/invisible construct, recognizing the tensions between the historical forms and the divine reality of the church that should neither be separated nor confused. Yet all encourage evangelicals to think, act, and deal more in reference to the visible reality and warn against seeking refuge in an invisible community, stressing the importance of membership and active involvement in some particular church. The Bible, they agree, does not favor one particular polity, whether episcopal, presbyterian, or congregational, but believers can glean from Scripture the principles that are fundamental to church order.
TOWARD A CORPORATE VISION
As much as Giles, Clowney, and Smith seek a more corporate appreciation of the church in an age driven by individualism, none sketches a vision of how evangelicalism would be different if his ideas were taken seriously. Their practical focus tends to fall on the church at the congregational level, although Giles includes an insightful consideration of “the Denomination as Church,” and Smith’s 12 pages of “practical theology” scratch the surface of Christian unity and cooperative ministry.
The difficulty is partly structural: Where the ministers speak of the organized church, the identity of evangelicalism in the United States is increasingly tied to an ad hoc, national network of parachurch organizations–what George Marsden likens to a feudal system. As such, the evangelical vision is mediated not through cooperation or a representative process that engages all the churches, but by creative, energetic individuals who perceive a need, claim a calling from God to launch a particular ministry, form a board for legal reasons, then solicit funds by building a direct-mail constituency. If the vision strikes a responsive chord, the leader is crowned with honor and respect and looked upon in some fashion to speak for “the church.”
This is not all bad, as Clowney points out; parachurch ministries can reflect an energized laity and meet needs the institutional church overlooks. But most parachurch organizations are essentially private in nature, representing their founder or board, not the whole church. In addition, their explosive growth has obscured more than complemented the corporate dimensions of church life that, if nurtured, could temper the excesses of the movement they represent. Further clouding the situation, parachurch “polity” is now being adopted by the church, expressed in the dynamics of megachurches that boast “every member a minister” but are ruled by their own form of archbishop. The same dynamics are seen in the autocratic pastor of more conventional churches, unaware that his congregational or presbyterian polity has historically stressed a more corporate approach to discerning God’s will.
While substantial hurdles stand in the way of a more corporate vision for evangelicalism, one option in the United States could be a rebirth of the National Association of Evangelicals into a truly deliberative assembly aimed at nurturing a more churchly approach to evangelical life. To the degree the assembly represents a good portion of evangelical churches while maintaining relations to the parachurch world, the structure could mediate an evangelical corporate vision, responding to the casualties stemming from an individualistic and pragmatic approach to church and ministry. Modeling a more formal, deliberative, and regulative style of organization and discourse, the advisory body could deal, for example, with the crisis in the pastoral vocation, including the undermining of the sanctity of the pastor-congregation relation, reflected in part by the epidemic of forced pastoral exits documented by “Leadership” (Winter 1996); it could also explore how denominations and independent seminaries might work together in theological education and ministerial preparation, an antidote to the free-market approach that has reaped a proliferation of divinity schools chartered by private groups and individuals without any formal deliberation by the church as to need.
Yet none of this could work without, fundamentally, a greater sense of “churchmanship” excercised through one’s own congregation and denomination and coupled with an openness to exploring means through which a greater representation of the whole church can be realized. To that end, the three sermons skillfully delivered by these preachers provide the evangelical faithful with much to ponder in seeking not just to call individuals to faith, but to build and be the Christian community, the church of Jesus Christ.
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