Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, edited by Dorothy C. Bass (Jossey-Bass, 232 pp.; $22.50, hardcover);
The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity, by Thomas C. Reeves (Free Press, 276 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, a frequent contributor to Christianity Today.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, Sunday—the Lord's Day—was special.
The family routine said it all. On Saturday evening, we would get ready for
the big day, laying out our Sunday-dress clothes and shining the shoes, while
Mom ironed shirts and dresses and Dad gave us boys haircuts. On Sunday morning,
we would head off for Sunday school and church in the station wagon, then
return home for a big dinner, often with the grandparents, which took the
lion's share of the afternoon. We returned to church in the late afternoon
for youth groups followed by evening worship—where we learned almost every
song in the hymnal. Absolutely nothing interfered with that sacred schedule.
We would never darken the door of a store; most of them, including the shopping
mall, were closed in any case. Later, when my high-school swimming team would
occasionally practice on Sunday night, I had to explain to my coach that
I would be in church with my family.
Today, with a family of my own, we still attend Sunday school and worship
faithfully every Sunday morning, but the Lord's Day is just not the same.
We rarely have a big leisurely dinner, as our extended family lives at a
distance. Nor do we return to church in the evening, as many churches have
axed Sunday-evening worship services. So I am left with teaching my kids
the classic hymns of faith in the family room. On occasion we patronize a
commercial establishment—few stores are closed on Sundays now—and at times
we have allowed sporting events for our three children to crowd the day.
While some might be tempted to say my childhood Sundays were too restrictive
and that my family today has simply adjusted to the frantic realities of
the 1990s, I think our weakened observance of the Sabbath is not unrelated
to the weakened character of today's Christians, including yours truly. Granted,
evangelicals are more educated and sophisticated than they were a generation
ago, but something is clearly missing in the fabric of our lives.
A similar observation represents the core of Practicing
Our Faith, a collection of essays that seeks to recover not just the
Lord's Day, but 11 other spiritual disciplines and ancient practices of the
church that, when "woven together, suggest the patterns of a faithful Christian
way of life for our time." Edited by Dorothy Bass, an Indiana clergywoman
of the United Church of Christ who grew up a Presbyterian in my hometown,
the book addresses primarily a mainline rather than an evangelical audience.
Nevertheless, by focusing on the connection between faith and practice, Bass's
Lilly Endowment-funded project highlights the anomaly of professing Christians,
evangelicals included, whose lives differ very little in form and practice
from those of their pagan neighbors.
The book does a fair job reflecting upon and suggesting ways to recover the
visible expressions of the Christian life—neglected habits such as practicing
hospitality, singing hymns, and living in moderation. Bass's essay, "Practicing
Sabbath" (CT, Sept. 1, 1997, p. 38), is especially welcome, arguing that honoring the Sabbath makes for good Christians
and good societies. Amy Plantinga Pauw's chapter, "Dying Well," is equally
strong, exploring ways "the Christian community can offer a depth of spiritual
and practical support for the sorrowing that the funeral home can never match."
Two factors, however, may limit the book's ability to deliver on its promise.
While the volume boasts religious and ethnic "diversity," eight of the thirteen
contributors represent all but one of the Seven Sisters of the mainline;
evangelical representation is sparse. The more serious weakness is the lack
of a solid theological basis that would give the essays their needed punch.
The book oozes with vague and sentimental affirmations of Christian doctrine
that will offend no one, as reflected in a chapter on forgiveness that struggles
to talk about sin, grace, and redemption in clear biblical categories. At
times the book is preoccupied with the merely trendy, not to say bizarre;
the lead essay, "Honoring the Body," encourages mothers to help daughters
come to terms with their bodies by turning baths into baptismal re-enactments.
So while Practicing Our Faith raises important questions, Bass provides
ammunition for another midwestern historian with mainline credentials, Thomas
Reeves, whose The Empty Church looks at the challenges to the Christian
faith at the end of the twentieth century from a different, yet related,
angle. Reeves, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin known for
his probing books on Sen. Joseph McCarthy and President John F. Kennedy,
is more concerned with the decline of orthodoxy than orthopraxy in the mainline.
This respected scholar and—at the time he was writing The Empty
Church—active Episcopal layman confirms what evangelicals, from Gresham
Machen to Alister McGrath, have contended about the mainline for decades.
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Lacking experience in church politics as a clergyman, however, Reeves's
prescriptions for the dying patient seem a bit na. He stresses the
importance of recovering "the truths of the ancient faith" and training clergy
"to preach and live them," calling for the creation of new seminaries to
bypass denominational seminaries captivated by "radical feminists, political
activists, [and] multicultural relativists." Yet this has been the conservative
strategy for at least three generations—from the founding of Westminster
in 1929, Fuller in 1947, and Gordon-Conwell in 1969—and the results in terms
of mainline reform have been marginal at best.
Indeed, since completing The Empty Church (first published in the
fall of 1996), Reeves himself has come to despair over the prospects for
reform within the mainline. Shortly after Episcopalians held their seventy-second
general convention in Philadelphia in July of this year, Reeves joined the
Roman Catholic Church.
In retrospect, Reeves's book offers clues that he was on the road to Rome.
As much as he commends evangelicals in these pages, he does not believe that
they offer compelling alternatives for conservative mainliners. He is
particularly scornful in dismissing the theory that evangelical growth in
recent years is primarily due to mainline defections: "Warehouselike buildings,
sobbing pop gospel soloists, garish theatrics, shouting preachers, and boisterous
worshippers," Reeves writes, "cannot appeal to many of us" who value "dignity,
reverence, beauty, learning, tradition, and a sense of the numinous."
Does The Empty Church hold lessons still for orthodox
believers—mainline and evangelical—who are not inclined to follow Reeves's
example? Yes. Across the board, Reeves contends, American believers maintain
a superficial Christianity that allows them to pick and choose the terms
of faith, living practically the same way as those who claim no faith at
all. "Christianity in modern America is, in large part, innocuous," he writes.
"It tends to be easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not require
a zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God."
How to move from a shallow, cultural Christianity to a serious faith that
affects the everyday life of here and now is indeed the challenge of our
time. Perhaps evangelicals might begin with the recognition of the vital
connection Saint Paul draws in Titus 2 between sound behavior and sound doctrine,
drawing upon the orthopraxy of Dorothy Bass without neglecting the orthodoxy
of Thomas Reeves. Since the time of Israel, God has demanded from his people
a pattern of daily life that sets them apart from unbelievers. Where weak
theology has led to a neglect of these practices in the mainline community,
evangelicals are today threatened by the process in reverse. Only as evangelicals
give as much attention to what they do as what they believe can they expect
to remain a holy people set apart for the Lord.
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Short Notices The Early Church Fathers: Their Writings and Teachings on CD-ROM ($99.95, Segen Corporation,
www.segen.com).
Want to know what the Fathers said about the "Mother of God"? After a recent
Newsweek article about Mary, we did. Using the review copy of this
CD-ROM, we located all 431 references to
Mary in the first nine volumes of the Eerdmans edition of the Ante-Nicene
Fathers in an instant. (It took five hours to read all those passages.)
The full 37-volume set will be released in thirds, and purchasers of this
first CD-ROM will receive upgrades for $10.
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