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Caught up in the Authorial Void

Tradition, Authority and Dissent

Barry Harvey Baylor University

What does not teach Christ is not apostolic, not even if taught by Peter or Paul. On the other hand, what does preach Christ is apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, or Herod does it.

Martin Luther

In Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory the main character, a nameless “whiskey priest,” does not flee to safety in the aftermath of an anti-clerical revolution in Mexico, as the other, more respectable clerics had done, but stays behind performing the duties of his office. He finally tries to escape to a safer region of the country, but is arrested after delaying one more time to hear the confession of a dying man. Once in custody he gently debates the police lieutenant who had pursued him for months, telling him that he is not fighting against a dissolute priest unworthy of the martyrdom that was about to be his fate, but God. The officer, looking to shift the focus of what was becoming an uncomfortable conversation, asks him why he, “of all people,” remained behind when the others fled. The priest replies, “Once I asked myself that.

The fact is, a man isn’t presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and the other bad. He gets caught up.”1

Greene’s whiskey priest reminds us that the full range of one’s convictions and dispositions about the world and one’s place in it are formed by getting caught up in routine activities and

1Portions of this paper were drawn from “Where, Then, Do We Stand? Baptists, History and Authority,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 29 (Winter 2002): 359–380, and from a forthcoming book by Brazos Press entitled Prophesy to These Bones: Re-Membering the Body of Christ for the Life of the World.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (New York: Viking, 1946; New York: Penguin, 1991), Caught up in the Authorial Void 2 judgments that provide the basic constraints on what human beings can reasonably do and say together in the particular time and place they were born. The allegiance women and men pledge to God, country or kin, their settled habits of acting and speaking, their imaginative grasp of the world around them, the modes of reasoning they employ, and above all, the loves that shape and direct these activities and affections, are never the product of disembodied, unencumbered individuals choosing their “values” or “worldviews” as a result of some sort of disengaged study of reality. These began to emerge and develop when they were quite literally born into the networks of relationships and historical events. Though it would be manifestly false to say that a person’s beliefs, loyalties, habits and affections can never change dramatically, such dramatic change only occurs when alternative sets of relationships and events catch and hold her or him within their nets. When that happens, we typically say that one has undergone a conversion of some sort, both good and bad.2

Baptists, especially in North America—conservatives and moderates alike—have undergone just such a conversion, having been caught up for more than a century now in patterns of knowing and acting that attempt to sidestep the difficult process of historical reflection and appropriation of Scripture. These patterns seduced us with the prospect of bypassing the question of tradition, that is, of how the body of Christ learns its own way of speaking, thinking and acting. As a result, we set aside many of the convictions, practices and institutions that over the centuries have bound all Christians together in a complex dialectical relationship which had

2 No one is taught how to think or act by first learning various theories and then selecting a normative stance on the basis of supposedly disinterested observations. Such theories properly function retrospectively, to describe, justify or critique the practices and habits within which people find themselves always already situated. The shared judgments and activities that make it possible for the members of a community to engage in meaningful transactions with each other are not fashioned in a social vacuum, but are constantly being forged and then reforged on the anvil of history. And for better and for worse, these dispositions and practices can and do change over time in response to the events and persons, opportunities and temptations that constitute in part that community’s ongoing existence. See D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology, Church, and the Social Order (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001), 37. My thanks to Long also for bringing Greene’s story and observations to my attention. Caught up in the Authorial Void 3 endured in spite of the many tensions in Christ’s body. To hear Baptists talk, men and women only have two choices with respect to the authority of tradition: either we must blindly salute the flag as it is run up the pole, or make some other (typically an obscene) gesture. Some substitute a view of Scripture as an infallible “store-house of facts” that can be ascertained, collected, and combined using “the same rules in the collection of facts, as govern the man of science.”3 Others assume that individuals innately possess a timeless inner core that provides them with an unquenchable source of reason and value, conferring a competency in “religious” matters that functioned apart from a life-long participation in a tradition of life and language.

In part as a result of this response to the question of tradition, the life and witness of too many Baptist congregations are now caught up in alien disciplinary regimes, patterns of political sovereignty, economic accumulation and modes of regulating behavior that have worked to dissolve the conventions, customs and constraints that are necessary to form the citizens of

God’s pilgrim city in the way of the cross. Tragically it is common to hear people imply that a relationship with God or membership in the church is only another good or service whose purpose is to enhance an individual’s preferred lifestyle. If Christians continue to be formed in accordance with the household expectations of a body politic that bears little resemblance to the ways of the messianic regime inaugurated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we may continue to pledge allegiance to Christ with our lips but we shall be enacting—however unwittingly—a very different set of loyalties, virtues and convictions.

Baptists can no longer assume, as past generations may have been able to do, that though

“the particular involvements of the Christian community may vary according to time, place, and circumstance, the existence of that community is itself relatively unproblematic.” We can no

3 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1891; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d.), 1:10–11. Caught up in the Authorial Void 4 longer take it for granted that there will continue to be a church “that more or less resembles the body of Christ as we have known it.”4 Without the kind of intellectual and moral context that only a tradition in good repair can provided, we will increasingly become, like the ancient

Israelites, refugees and exiles in a strange land, compelled to “serve other gods made by human hands, objects of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (Deut. 4:28). It will require a concerted effort to extricate us from these tendencies, and effort that must be grounded in a thick recovery of the wider, catholic tradition.

Caught Up in the Way of Jesus Christ

“Getting caught up” accurately describes the events that originally constituted the body of Christ.

A small band of Galilean Jewish peasants unexpectedly found themselves, as Dietrich

Bonhoeffer puts it in one his letters from prison, “caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event.”5 According to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth was the apocalypse of the long-awaited reign of God, a nonviolent, eschatological revolution that decisively set “the sign of God’s justice on earth”6 before the rulers and authorities of this age. His life, death and resurrection ensnared these unsuspecting women and men in the middle of the divine struggle with, and triumph over temporal powers and principalities that have long sought to usurp God’s sovereign authority over creation. Through them a new and distinctive set of allegiances, convictions, dispositions and loves irrupted in a world subject to the rule of death and sin,

4 Michael Budde, The (Magic) Kingdom of God: Christianity and Global Culture Industries (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 13. 5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged edition, trans. R. H. Fuller, John Bowden, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 361–62. 6 André Trocmé, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, trans. Michael H. Shank and Marlin E. Martin (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 1973), 52. Caught up in the Authorial Void 5 bearing witness to the good news that, in the end, God will be all in all, creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and life rather than death will have the final word.

Through the power of the Spirit, these early followers of Jesus embodied before the world a distinctive pattern of life together, an alternative set of habits and relations, and a different story in terms of which to make sense of—quite literally, to imagine—the order of things. God fashioned from the resources of diverse times and places a new and transformative idiom for catching a glimpse of the beauty of truth. Through their participation in the body of Christ, these disciples bore witness that the meaning of all other figures, events, and institutions did not reside in themselves, but were instead as signs, the significance of which could only be discerned in relationship to the one in whom God’s own speech took flesh. The reorganization of human life and language inaugurated by the life and passion of Jesus, a project embodied in and mediated by the practices and institutions of the church, including modes of material exchange, became a never-ending task.

For more than a thousand years the descendents of Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene spoke with conviction about the world as a book authored by God, with the events of history unfolding in the manner of a dramatic narrative. Peoples, objects and events were traces of God’s intentions for creation, “signs of the possibility of communion, covenanted trust and the recognition of shared need and shared hope.”7 The transactions and relationships that comprised the world and history were therefore interconnected, constituting in some way or another either anticipations or rejections of the divine recapitulation of all things, both in heaven and on earth, in Christ. And as in all good stories, they believed that the role played by the exchanges and associations in this drama would not be fully revealed until the ending. Historical judgments

7 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 218. Caught up in the Authorial Void 6 were thus provisional in nature, typically cast in terms of a figural contrast between the present age and the age to come, the flesh and the Spirit, the earthly city and the City of God.8

The literary work that exemplified this confidence in the Middle Ages was Dante

Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. All things that took place on earth, under the earth and in heaven, past, present and future, were mysteriously ordered toward the beatific vision, and the story of the poet’s journey through the punishments of the inferno, up the penitential path of Mount

Purgatory and into the celestial rose of Paradise recapitulated in poetic form the pilgrimage of the soul to its beginning and end in God. Along the way the political intrigues and personal animosities, the friendships and the rivalries that characterized Dante’s rough-and-tumble world were vividly displayed in their orientation either away from or toward “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”9

At the heart of the church’s proclamation was its audacious claim that the meaning of every human action and affection, the significance of every movement of history, the veracity of every assertion, the wisdom of every construal of human experience, the reasonableness of every assumption of how human beings should relate to each other and the world of which they are inextricably a part, yea, even the movement of the sun and other stars, could only be truthfully assessed in connection with the brief but intense flurry of events that swirled around one Jewish man.10 This itinerant rabbi spent his days pursuing a way of life which, though his followers insisted that it recapitulated the way of peace lost in the fall, moved inexorably toward confrontation and violence. His life was cut short by a peculiar alliance between the mightiest

8 See David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 151. 9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. III, Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1986), XXXIII.145; p. 394. 10 This is not to insist that every utterance we make must be directly and explicitly related in some fashion to Christ, for the Christian concern with truth finally has to do “with the need to preserve the possibility of the kind of encounter with the truth-telling Christ that stands at the source of the Church’s identity.” Williams, On Christian Theology, 82. Caught up in the Authorial Void 7 and most efficient empire the world had ever known, and those whom this empire had selected to administer the affairs of his own people. And yet his mysterious triumph over death, vindicating all that he had accomplished during his lifetime, decisively established him as the archetype of humanity and creation, and so radically called into question the dominant practices, relations and habits that the task of reconfiguring language and life to accommodate this center point continues to this day.11

The complex plot and many subplots of this story were detailed for the faithful in God’s other work, the Bible, according to which all things ultimately find their significance in their convergence upon or divergence from the person and work of Christ. Were it not for sin, writes

Henri de Lubac, “the symbol of the world, in its unspoiled transparency, would have sufficed.”

But after the fall, humans needed the help of Scripture to decipher it.12 In the words of John

Scotus Erigena, “the surface of the Scriptures” and “the sensible forms of the world” comprised the two garments of Christ. They were like two veils that filtered the overwhelmingly brilliant light of divinity, thereby concealing the feet of the Word. But they were also signs that, through their “reason” or “spirit,” allowed women and men to catch a glimpse of the beauty of truth itself.13

Though the beauty of truth manifested in a world uttered and meant by God was no doubt eternal, the church did not think the means for securing human access to it were commonly available. The Christian community constituted the “site on which universal truth was produced, and it was clear to them that truth was not produced universally.”14 The practices and institutions

11 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 2d ed. (Boston: Cowley, 1990), 1. 12 Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 77. 13 John Scotus Erigena, De Divisione Naturae, Bk. 30, cited by de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 77. 14 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 45 n. 29; cf. 35. Formally the judgment that truth was not produced universally would have affirmed by Jews and Muslims as well. Caught up in the Authorial Void 8 of the body of Christ were therefore needed if men and women were to apprehend—as fully as the finite human mind was able—the goodness, beauty and truth that had created the world.

Only those who had achieved a sufficient level of competence in the skills and virtues of the ecclesial household would be capable of truthfully deciphering the movements and motifs of history as elements of a dramatic story. It was the church’s distinctive life and language that authorized them to talk coherently about the author of all things, and of reasoning creatures especially. “Whoever enters Jesus’ house is his true disciple,” writes Origen. “He comes in by thinking with the Church, by living according to the Church.”15

Prior to the eighteenth century, then, Christians did not regard the patterns and direction of history as givens, a sort of universally accessible text that anyone with a modicum of intelligence could use to decode the meaning of human existence. The practices, virtues and skills of the ecclesial body of Christ, through which the beauty of truth (and goodness) was mediated to a fallen yet cherished world, were required if human beings were to respond truthfully to the Love who is the author of all things, who both moves the sun and the other stars, and who cherishes the creature specially made in Love’s image. This ascent of the mind to God ultimately depended on God’s prior act of gathering together the commonwealth of Israel, into which the

Gentile followers of Jesus have been grafted to form the church (Eph 2:12, Rom 11:17).

A New Configuration

In our time and circumstances, however, matters are much different. A radical shift has occurred in the way the book of the world is correlated with the book of Scripture. For most of Christian history the former was considered unintelligible apart from the latter, and both were finally

15 Origen, “Dialogue of Origen with Heraclides and His Fellow Bishops on the Father, the Son, and the Soul”, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, no. 54, eds. Walter J. Burghardt, Thomas Comerford Lawler and John J. Dillon (New York: Paulist, 1992), 69. Caught up in the Authorial Void 9 indecipherable without Christ’s eucharistic body as the idiomatic “middle term” that linked the two “books” together. In the seventeenth century, however, what Hans Frei calls “the great reversal” takes place across the theological spectrum, as interpretation sought to fit the biblical story into another world with its own story “rather than incorporating that world in the biblical story.”16

As a result the book of “Nature” became the true sphere of God’s works, the real text on which God’s writing was inscribed. The Bible was regarded as simply the republication of

“Natural Religion.” Modernity’s great reversal attributed to the book of creation its own self- evident intelligibility, and then invested it with indisputable authority for interpreting the meaning and truthfulness of all sacred texts, written as they were in merely human language.17

And so it was that, as Norman Sykes puts it, “the Word of God assumed a secondary position to his works as set forth in the created universe. For whereas the testimony of the latter was universal and ubiquitous, the evidence of Revelation was confined to sacred books written in dead languages, whose interpretation was not agreed even amongst professed Christians, and which related moreover to distant events which had occurred in remote times and in places far removed from the centres of learning and civilization.”18

Moreover, to claim as the church has that human beings must be apprenticed within a particular community and tradition in order to discern truth, goodness and beauty deeply offends modern sensibilities, which were forged on the assumption that human beings unencumbered by such impediments could get to the bottom of everything, that the only limits that mattered were

16 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1974), 130. 17 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 41. 18 Norman Sykes, “The Religion of Protestants,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 1975), 195–96, cited by Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 41. Caught up in the Authorial Void 10 the limits of being itself, which were identical to the limits of reason.19 Modern thinkers sought a pure beginning for their thinking and acting, a method capable of lifting men (sic) out of particular times and places, allowing them to escape the limits of mere creatureliness to see all the kingdoms of the world in an instant. In particular, they believed that nothing vital would be lost should the surplus baggage of “religion” be removed from the domain of the natural, that is, the purely human. Finally, there was a pronounced shift in how they depicted determination and contingency, with human choices, natural causes, and chance replacing medieval cosmologies such as one finds in the Divine Comedy.

Radically new configurations of world and self were thus instituted to train those who for over a millennium formed the heart of Western Christendom to think, feel and act quite differently in every sphere of life. Willingly or not, these nations and peoples divested themselves of the old, old story that regarded the things of this world as an ensemble of signs uttered and intended by God, and apart from which it had no meaning. The accumulated social capital in the form of practices, institutions and conceptions about human community and the good was reinvested in a series of political, economic and cultural projects which assumed that the social mediation of transcendence was no longer needed to ascend to truth, goodness and beauty. The aim of these projects was to liberate us from anything that we did not choose for ourselves, whether it came from family, country, village, or church. We were to be set free from the authority of any shared past to author our own individual stories (save, of course, from the authority of the state, which promised to ensure freedom and security in exchange for unquestioned political sovereignty). Human progress would ostensibly be measured solely by the degree to which individuals realized independence from any authority outside themselves.20

19 Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967; New York: Crossroad, 1998), p. 171. 20 For a more detailed account of this project see Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996). Caught up in the Authorial Void 11

The pioneers of these grand experiments assumed that in making these moves the intelligibility of history and purposefulness of human existence would not be seriously disturbed.

They continued to think of the world as a kind of text that possessed its own independent intelligibility, and thus which could be read by those who had learned its basic grammar. These assumptions found canonical expression in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which according to Alasdair MacIntyre represented a particular moment in the history of nineteenth-century thought when it appeared that a comprehensive scientific synthesis was at hand. Within this synthesis the various sciences were distinguished, not by their methodologies, but by their subject matter alone. The constitutive elements of every science, according to the article on “Logic” in the Encyclopaedia by Robert Adamson, are first, the data or facts; second, the unifying synthetic conceptions supplied by methodological reflection on the storehouse of facts; third, the methods so employed that allow the inquirer to move from the data to the unifying conceptions in theoretical discovery and then back again in the work of explaining and testing the theories; and finally, continuous progress in supplying ever more adequate unifying conceptions that specify ever more fundamental laws of nature. Indeed, writes MacIntyre, progress is among science’s most important unifying conceptions.21

There was a great deal of disagreement, to be sure, over the precise nature of the plot of the book of Nature, but until recently relatively few seriously doubted whether human history in particular finally made sense. In North America, for example, this sense of a meaningful history was achieved for a time when elements of the Christian hope for the future were detached from its ecclesial roots and grafted into other ideas and images to form what is often referred to as the

American dream. According to John Howard Yoder, one of those alien lines of thought was the

21 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 20–21. Caught up in the Authorial Void 12 ill-defined yet potent idea of progress, which came into the American psyche from many sources: German idealism (specifically Hegel and Marx), Darwinian social theory,22 and other transmutations and reformulations of hopefulness “which seem similar to the Christian hope for history yet are founded on other kinds of warrants.” Progress through an empty, homogenous time23 becomes a kind of cosmic imperative or impulse, the necessity of which can be asserted with certainty even if we do not presently see evidence of it.24

A second source of the American vision, writes Yoder, is the apparent success of the continental takeover by Western European immigrants, “the first and most successful specimen of the worldwide colonial expansion of European travel and technology.” The seemingly inexhaustible supply of natural resources (once “liberated” from the control of the previous inhabitants of this continent, who did not “choose to develop” them as they “should” have), the ability and the willingness of the immigrants to exploit them as they sought to fashion from a

“wilderness” (again, those who once lived here do not count) a powerful civilization “reinforced still further the ethnocentric self-confidence which European culture had enough of to begin with and gave to the notion of a religiously founded civilizing mission the powerful amplification of several generations of impressive success.”25 The secularized eschatology at work here is unmistakable.

These new configurations of human life, which were originally conceived in Europe but first tested in America, sought to maintain an abiding faith in an underlying reality to human life

22 Contrary to many modern defenses of Darwin which assert that such social theories represent an illicit extension of Darwin’s strictly biological research, Michael Hanby demonstrates that many key concepts in Darwin’s work are borrowed directly from the social science of the time, especially the political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Michael Hanby, “Creation Without Creationism: Toward a Theological Critique of Darwinism,” Communio 30 (Winter 2003), 654–94. 23 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 261–62. 24 John Howard Yoder, “The Power Equation, Jesus, and the Politics of King,” in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 128–29. 25 Yoder, “The Power Equation, Jesus, and the Politics of King,” 128–9. Caught up in the Authorial Void 13 and the purposefulness of history while gradually disassociating themselves from the God who had been its beginning and end, and from the practices and traditions that bore witness to God.26

The developments that took place beginning in the late seventeenth century thus constituted the diremption of human existence from the plot, setting and characters of the Jewish and Christian

Scriptures, dramatically re-enacted time and again by the people of God. Richard Rorty contends that notables such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey (whom one pundit calls the chief apostles of American civil religion27) “hoped to separate the fraternity and loving kindness urged by the Christian scriptures from the ideas of supernatural parentage, immortality, and providence, and—most important—sin. They wanted Americans to take pride in what America might, all by itself and by its own lights, make of itself, rather than in America’s obedience to any authority—even the authority of God.”28

Though they obviously did not go to the extreme of completely separating fraternity and loving kindness from the Christian tradition, most Protestant churches in the United States also relied increasingly on the coherence and intelligibility of these new social configurations to flesh out their life and witness. They saw the future lying in the promise and possibility of a new and more perfect Christendom, a conviction that was exemplified in the title of a book by Walter

Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order. The preeminent voice in the social gospel movement in the first half of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch declared that social progress

—by which he meant the spread of democracy—“is more than natural. It is divine.” He commended Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples, Unitarians and Universalists in particular,

26 Robert Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” First Things 36 (October 1993), 21. 27 Richard John Neuhaus, “Three Constellations of American Religion,” in First Things 111 (March 2001) 72. Neuhaus reminds us that Rorty’s civil religion is the continuation of the social vision of Walter Rauschenbusch (who is his maternal grandfather), “except it is stripped of God and, if one may put it this way, the attendant theological baggage.” 28 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 15–6. Caught up in the Authorial Void 14 stating that they “represent the principles of pure democracy in church life. That is their spiritual charisma and their qualification for leadership in the democratization of the social order.”29

Fellow Baptist E. Y. Mullins makes the connection between Christian faith and democratic habits and institutions even more explicitly. He likened the “fundamental principals of true religion” to a stalactite descending from heaven to earth. The most important of these axioms was “soul competency,” which asserted that individuals unencumbered by any social practice or convention possessed a timeless inner source of spiritual insight that made them competent to judge for themselves the state of their relationship to God. American political society, in turn, was the stalagmite with its base upon the earth rising to meet the stalactite. Both the stalactite and the stalagmite were formed from the same life-giving stream of water that flows from the throne of God down to humankind. “When the two shall meet,” he wrote, “then heaven and earth will be joined together and the kingdom of God will have come among men. This is the process that runs through the ages.”30 Mullins had no doubt that history was approaching its true telos in the convergence of these principles of religion and the institutions of procedural democracy. When this process was concluded it would mark nothing less than the presence of

God’s reign on earth.

Though the circumstances in which we now live and the kinds of assumptions we can credibly make about history are very different from those Rauschenbusch and Mullins could make in the first half of the twentieth century when they wrote so confidently about a fundamental harmony between Christian identity and American political society, there are still some who venture to make such bold claims about the convergence of Christianity and the political and economic regime of liberal capitalism. Max Stackhouse, a theologian very much

29 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 23, 30. 30 E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908) 274, my emphasis. Caught up in the Authorial Void 15 influenced by Rauschenbusch, has argued that the Old Testament’s prophetic vision of a single created realm where all peoples live under a divine law and toward a divine end is being realized in the economic process of globalization. He thus declares unequivocally that “God is in globalization.”31 For the most part, however, we live in a world that rarely bothers to feign allegiance to the God whom Rauschenbusch and Mullins worshiped in all sincerity, nor does it take it for granted that the bits and pieces that remain from Christendom’s breakup are still needed to keep the wheels of unconstrained commerce and conspicuous consumption turning.

The renunciation of allegiance to God as the object of faith in a narratable world and the emergence of the idea of nature and history as autonomous domains over which autonomous human agency would one day reign supreme did not occur all at once and certainly did not happen according to some grand conspiracy. Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Isaac Newton did not want to dispense with what they regarded as the unquestioned “given” of morality that seemed to be jeopardized by their new scientific accounts of nature. Their intellectual heirs—

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel—thus sought a way of discriminating between the human world of freedom and purpose and the “natural” world of seemingly blind cause and effect, and they settled on this notion of history. George Grant writes:

It was indeed in this intellectual crisis (the attempt to understand the modern, sci- entific conception of nature that excluded any idea of final purpose, and to relate that conception to human purposiveness) that the modern conception of history first made its appearance…“History” was used to describe the particular human situation in which we are not only made but make. In this way of speaking, his- tory was not a term to be applied to the development of the earth and animals, but a term to distinguish the collective life of man (that unique being who is subject to cause and effect as defined in modern science, but also a member of the world of freedom).32

31 Max L. Stackhouse, “Public Theology and Political Theology in a Globalizing Era,” in Public Theology for the 21st Century. eds. William F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 179. 32 George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 11–12. The restriction of the concept of nature to the non-human world is a departure from its use in the medieval world, where it was used to Caught up in the Authorial Void 16

Different narratives were thus invoked to chart the plot of a history reconfigured around the institutions of the nation-state and a globalized market: social contract, manifest destiny, the inevitable triumph of science/liberal democracy/socialism/capitalism/globalization, etc. These stories sought to reinforce the belief that we inhabit a world possessing the properties of a unitary narrative, but this conviction has become increasingly difficult to sustain in a credible manner.

Each unsuccessful attempt to identify a convincing replacement for God in the narrative progress of history contributed another chapter to the chronicle of modernity’s increasingly frantic and futile effort to hold on to its inherited faith in a narratable world. The very forms of reasoning that distinguished the modern era proved to be a powerful corrosive, eating away at its own foundational assumption that human beings could, at least in principle, become like gods and distinguish between universal rationality and local acculturation, between the permanent truths of reason and temporary truths of facts, and between religion, myth, and tradition and something ahistorical, common to all human beings qua human. As it turns out, women and men have no such essence; we are “historical contingency all the way through.”33

The gradual diremption of history from the biblical story thus left the world for a time with a residual sense of the coming to be and passing away of history that once seemed coherent and convincing, but which progressively became thinner and less persuasive as time went by.34 As a result, the assertion that we are either at, or close to the end of history may not signify that there is a meaningful plot to human existence, provided we are clever enough to know where to look for it. On the contrary, it could mean that the world is indecipherable, and thus our confidence in an enduring meaning and purpose may in the end be illusory. As one noted literary critic puts it,

“World and book, it may be, are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing; we stand alone distinguish the operations of the created order in its own integrity from those of grace. 33 Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 267. 34 See Louglin, Telling God’s Story127–138. Caught up in the Authorial Void 17 before them, aware that they may be narratives only because of our impudent intervention, and susceptible of interpretation only by our hermetic tricks.” If this is indeed the case our sole hope and pleasure “is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us.”35 What we call “history” could well be a mere succession of happenings without connection, purpose, or goal other than the values we impose on each other and the world about us, the arbitrary nature of which only serves to mock us with the capriciousness of our existence.

The long-term coherence and intelligibility of any community and in any field of inquiry, in all its particularity and contingency, thus depend on a shared repertoire of activities, judgments and institutions that work in concert to constitute a common life and language that constitute living traditions. This framework of practices and dispositions authorizes its members to engage in meaningful transactions with each other and with the physical world about them, and supplies the basis for negotiating a modus vivendi with those outside their membership.

Though the dynamic medium of a tradition is never fixed, there are times when it becomes so fluid that it begins to lose coherence, and mutually incompatible accounts of the nature of things begin to multiply. The result is a degree of social fragmentation that culminates in a crisis of authority or authorial void.

An authorial void is analogous to the sorts of epistemological crises that have occupied the attention of philosophers of science for more than thirty years now. Epistemological crises occur when, within a basic research project, anomalies arise that resist all attempts to deal with them.

The problem, says philosopher Joseph Rouse, “is not that scientists do not know what to believe; scientists are professionally accustomed to uncertainty of that sort. It is that they are no longer

35 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) 145. Nicholas Lash rightly calls Kermode’s conclusions an example of sober and clear-sighted atheism. Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986) 73. Caught up in the Authorial Void 18 quite sure how to proceed: What investigations are worth undertaking, which supposed facts are unreliable artifacts, what concepts or models are useful guides for their theoretical or experimental manipulations?”36 While crises of this sort seldom if ever collapse completely the intelligibility of a field of activities and achievements, they do blur the shape and direction of that field, such that the practitioner becomes disoriented, unable to place his or her own work within it. One recognizes the need to try a different approach, another set of techniques or new instrumentation, but what sense these things would make is no longer clear.

The dilemma for a people caught up in an authorial void is not that its members do not know what to believe, say or do when confronted with new, strange or puzzling circumstances.

Mature women and men down through the centuries have recognized that they must deal with such ambiguity countless times throughout their lives. Indeed it is a perennial aspect of Christian life and thought as well. The difficulty is rather that the shared habits, activities, and institutions that allow the members of a community to interact with the world about them and engage in meaningful transactions with each other no longer provide the kind of intellectual and moral context within which disagreements are intelligible. As a result, they do not know how to go on and go further, or even know what that might mean. The uncertainty, however, is not limited to a single field or enterprise, as with an epistemological crisis in science. It affects virtually every aspect of that society, such that its members become disoriented, unable to locate the coherence and meaning of their lives within a common frame of reference that lends significance to their shared existence.37

36 Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) 33f. 37 This authorial void is not confined to the sphere of “values,” i.e., morality, religion, and personal consumption, but has conspired to colonize the domain of “facts,” as demonstrated by the public debate about evolution currently being conducted in the United States. See my article, “The Democratization of Science,” First Things 101 (March 2000), 17–20. Caught up in the Authorial Void 19

Conjuring up an Old Question

The modern concept of history as a meaningful narrative within the book of Nature was divorced from the book of Scripture, and thus stripped of its principal author, main character and overarching plot. For a time the loss of coherence, intelligibility and meaning brought about by this diremption went unnoticed, for there remained a residual stock of practices and institutions, concepts and convictions handed on to the post-Enlightenment world by its Jewish and Christian ancestors whose particular renderings of the world underwrote the substitute narratives and ersatz authors. But as this residue was increasingly distilled from its source and exposed to the withering critique of modern secular reason it began to disintegrate. As a result, says Jenson,

“modernity has lived on moral and intellectual capital that it has not renewed, and indeed could not have renewed without denying itself.”38 What should concern us as those called to offer up our bodies as living sacrifices for the sake of the world (Rom 12:1) is the distinct possibility that the note will shortly come due to a society that is already terribly overextended.

To be sure, the troublesome question of authority within the church is not a new one, but is as old as the Reformation itself. It has nonetheless taken on new urgency in recent years.

According to Bonhoeffer, one of the most pressing issues raised by the Confessing Church’s struggle with Nazism had to do with the institutional structures that support sound teaching. He writes in a 1940 letter to Eberhard Bethge that the pressing question is whether an authority for in church can be established that is grounded in Scripture and confession alone now that the separation from papal and from secular authority in the church has taken place. If such authority cannot be established, Bonhoeffer concludes, then the last possibility of an Evangelical Church has passed by. There are then only a few alternatives: a return to Rome or submission to the

38 Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” 20. Caught up in the Authorial Void 20 state church, or the way of individuation, that is, of the “protest” of true Protestantism against false authorities.39 As the events of 1933 to 1945 tragically demonstrate, the path of individuation failed church and non-church people alike in Germany, not to mention the Jews of

Europe and the other peoples of the world.

Bonhoeffer is not the only Protestant who has noted this dilemma. Wendell Berry, hardly an advocate of ecclesiastical authority, nonetheless doubts that “one can somehow become righteous by carrying protestantism to the logical conclusion of a one-person church.”40 And

Yoder observes that the slide downward to unaccountable individuality is implicit in the logic of the Reformers once “the hierarchy as interpreter of Scripture was set aside, and when the universities, consistories, synods, and convictions which were expected to take its place became fragmented.”41 For our part we Baptists must come to terms with the fact that we have become poster children for this escalating crisis of authority, vacillating constantly in an unholy and unhealthy rhythm between dogmatism and Sheilaism.42 Where should we turn now that we are slowly coming to realize that it is not possible to live a life free of so-called “external” constraints? Or to put it somewhat differently, how shall we go on and go further? And go on and go further toward…what? Such questions lend credence to the postmodernist’s contention that the world is in the end authorless, and thus the age of metanarratives that credibly identified such an author is over.

39 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Konspiration und Haft, 1040–1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, 16, eds. Jørgen Glenthøj, Ulrich Kabitz and Wolf Krötke (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/ Gütersloh Verlagshaus), 66. 40 Wendell Berry, “God and Country,” in What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), 101. 41 John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 24. 42 According to Robert Bellah, “Sheilaism” is the personalized faith of one woman who named it after herself. “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Bellah argues that Sheilaism is a perfectly natural expression of current American religious life. Robert Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) 221. Caught up in the Authorial Void 21

The church has little to gain in attempting to reinforce the crumbling bulwarks of the modern project that have been breached repeatedly over the last few decades. Though it was not always intended as such, its story is in many respects nothing other than a three-hundred-year attempt to undermine the Christian tradition. The architects of the modern age sought to replace the authority of the scriptures and the tradition that built up around them with a construct of science and morality that was based solely on what has since been shown to be a highly contestable conception of human rationality. Now that this construct is under assault from many quarters, its axioms and formulae widely regarded as suspect, it seems unwise for the church to spend precious intellectual capital in a futile effort to shore up its eroding foundations.43

Neither should Christians follow the lead of postmodern cults who discern nothing but chaos and call it carnival. Postmodern holophobia44 reflects the pessimism of a generation of intellectuals whose hopes in the triumph of the institutions of modernity over the ills of humankind—cultural, social, political, scientific, and economic—proved ill founded. Such pessimism is a form of neurosis, claims Nicholas Boyle, and those who suffer from it exhibit the characteristically neurotic compulsion to repeat a particular emotional stimulus, in this case, the parricidal act of shattering bourgeois identity. They are unable to accept the loss of their past, namely, the emancipatory project of modernity, and thus subscribe to a view of the present as an

43 This is not to say that the divine mandate set before the exiles in Babylon by Jeremiah to seek the welfare of the city is thereby abrogated (Jer. 29:7), or that we are relieved of the obligation to cooperate with the earthly city in the pursuit of the material goods necessary to life in this age. But as Augustine observes, we are to seek these things according to a faith, love, and hope that is different from those affirmed by the earthly city, governed as it is by the libido dominandi, the lust to mastery. The claim of the powers of this world to the moral authority to determine the kinds and order of goods men and women should pursue is thus predicated on the possession, threat and use of coercive force, and thus on death and the fear of death. By contrast, the church is called upon to cultivate those virtues that will allow them to use earthly goods prudently, directing their use towards that alone which can truly be called peace, “a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.” Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, I.Pref., XVIII.54, XIX.17, ed. R. W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3, 908, 947. 44 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 4–5. Caught up in the Authorial Void 22 endlessly repeated moment of consumption.45 They greedily devour what past generations have produced, but produce little or nothing to sustain future generations.

As an alternative to the exhaustion of modernity and the neuroses of postmodernity Boyle reiterates the traditional Christian conviction that our identity becomes visible to us in an act of historical interpretation, and more specifically in the process by which the world to which human beings belong becomes the world in which they make their dwelling place. The interpretive art whereby we participate in the receiving and making of time and place as history takes form “in the words by which a past given to us is related a future of our own making.”46 In line with

Boyle’s suggestion I shall pose the question thusly: How should the church, drawing upon its distinctive interpretive art, respond to the authorial crisis of the present times, and what role might Baptists play in that ecclesial response? Any attempt to reassert the dominance of the church’s interpretive art over the global republic of commerce and consumption is not only misguided and doomed to failure, but is sure to add grist to the postmodernist’s mill. With regard to its own understanding of human existence as narratable, however, there may yet be time for the body of Christ to rediscover the grammar and syntax of its shared life and language and thereby learn again how to worship truthfully and live together faithfully before the one whom we confess to be the beginning and end of all things.

This process of rediscovering the church’s interpretive art must encompass all those activities and relationships that constitute the Christian tradition—the communal reading of

Scripture; the preaching, teaching, baptizing and eucharistic communing that nurture a called-out church membership; the sharing of worldly burdens within the fellowship of the church and the extension of hospitality to those without; the work of fraternal admonition and mutual

45 Nicholas Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 318. 46 Boyle, Who Are We Now? 318. Caught up in the Authorial Void 23 forgiveness within congregations and the task of moral discernment and doctrinal consultation between them; and yes, the legitimate function of a formally recognized and properly constituted magisterial office—which, by God’s grace, might allow the body of Christ to “regain itself as church.”47

For Baptists in particular this means that we must learn again what it means to be fellow travelers with a host of sisters and brothers in a communal way of life that has a center but ultimately no synchronic or diachronic boundary, for God has summed up all things in that center which is Christ. More specifically, we must recover what we once knew but have largely forgotten, namely, what it means to serve both church and world as a dissenting voice within a larger ecclesial body. This will require of Baptists “a generosity humble enough to accept that, precisely as a corrective, [our] own tradition is not self-sufficient, and must rediscover its place within a larger catholic whole.”48 We can no longer indulge in the fantasy which would lead us to believe that we can skip over this catholic tradition, with all of its admitted messiness, and start afresh at some unsullied point of departure, be it a conception of revelation that consists of the delivery of otherworldly facts in propositional truths gleaned from the pages of the Bible, or the supposition that the unencumbered soul is always-already in relation to God in the trans- cultural, pre-linguistic immediacy of individual self-consciousness.

Capitulation of the Church to the World

Michael Hollerich notes that Protestantism was once linked to its Catholic past “in a complex dialectical relationship which confessional polemics could never obscure.” We can see these

47 Michael J. Hollerich, “Retrieving a Neglected Critique of Church, Theology and Secularization in Weimar Germany,” Pro Ecclesia 2 (Summer 1993), 329. 48 Gerald W. Schlabach, “The Correction of the Augustinians: A Case Study in the Critical Appropriation of a Suspect Tradition,” in The Free Church and the Early Church, D. H. Williams, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 74. Caught up in the Authorial Void 24 connections in a number of liturgical, spiritual, doctrinal and ecclesiastical practices and institutions shared by Catholics and Protestants.49 Due to the transformations in later Protestant groups, however, these links have faded from memory. Catholic theologian Erik Peterson rightly observes that one of the most astonishing features of modern Protestantism is that

it stands in alienated, uncomprehendingly opposition, not only to Catholicism— which at least makes psychological sense—but it its own past in traditional Prot- estantism…The only way to grasp this incomprehension is to realize that the onto- logical basis of Protestantism has changed. The civil and public character of the Protestant church and theology, which was essentially definitive for traditional Protestantism, has vanished with the extinction of the Christian state.50

Modern Protestantism looked to so-called universal truths of reason, pietistic inwardness and church activism to compensate for the loss of its public raison d’être.51

Baptists would do well to heed what Hollerich has to say on this point, for if their writings are any indication, our earliest forebears also embraced most of the convictions and practices that bound Catholics and Protestants together in a dialectical relationship, though often in modified form.52 Instead of locating our identity within this complex dialectical relationship with the

Catholic (and Orthodox) tradition, however, many appeal to so-called historic Baptist principles such as soul competency.53 Rather than serving as effective substitutes for the operation of a vital tradition, these principles unwittingly perpetuate “the Protestant convention of de facto privileging, indeed canonizing, a specific period of church history…with unique normative significance in a peculiarly definitive way—not tradition as norma normata but actually another

49 Hollerich, “Retrieving a Neglected Critique,” 326. 50 Erik Peterson, “Briefwechsel mit Adolf Harnack und ein Epilog,” in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel, 1951) 313; cited in Hollerich, “Retrieving a Neglected Critique,” 326 51 Hollerich, “Retrieving a Neglected Critique,” 327. 52 See Philip E. Thompson, “Seventeenth-Century Baptists Confessions in Context,” and Steven R. Harmon, “Baptist Confessions of Faith and the Patristic Traditions,” both found in Perspectives in Religious Studies 29 (Winter 2002): 335–348 and 349–58 respectively. 53 Perhaps the best known articulation of these principles is found in Walter B. Shurden, The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys Publishing, 1993). Shurden lists Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom and religious freedom as the distinguishing principles of Baptists. Caught up in the Authorial Void 25 norma normans alongside of Scripture.”54 The sort of anti-Catholic, anti-credal positions articulated in these principles ironically instantiates what they were designed to prevent— supplanting the authority of Scripture as the norming norm of Christian existence.

Baptists often forget that the formation and transmission of an authoritative canon of

Scripture did not occur spontaneously, but came about as a result of a dogmatic decision of the church, the apostolic precedent for which is recorded in the Book of Acts: “It seemed good to the

Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). Popular slogans such as, “We have no creed but the Bible” are in the final analysis oxymorons because they function as a de facto creed to establish the biblical canon as the final norm. The Reformation banner sola scriptura, if understood apart from the worship, confession and teaching of the church down through the centuries, has no grounding. Storming out of the ecclesial house of tradition like headstrong adolescents jeopardizes the canonical function of the Bible as the norming norm of our common life and language. Subsequent appeals to the authority of Scripture—regardless of whether they are based on rationalist proofs for its veracity or on some sort of claim to an unmediated inner awareness of transcendence—act as solvents that actually undermine the Bible’s authority and deepen the authorial void that looms beneath our feet. In the final analysis such appeals are reductive attempts to bypass the difficult question of how Christians actually acquire a competency in the use of Scripture. Apart from the institutions and deliberations that were indelibly inscribed within this process, the Bible’s normative status can never be anything more than an arbitrary imposition on the competency of an individual’s soul by a particular church.

By what other authority does a Baptist congregation presume to exclude from its ranks any

54 Hollerich, “Retrieving a Neglected Critique,” 329. Underwriting this Protestant convention is the contention that the church “fell” shortly after the apostles died, its practice and teaching corrupted by alien elements, and that the true gospel was only recovered in the sixteenth century during the Reformation. D. H. Williams rightly notes that this theoretical paradigm for interpreting church history is based on numerous problematic assumptions. D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) 101–131. Caught up in the Authorial Void 26 competent soul who denies that the Bible is the norma normans non normata, the norm with no norm over it, or that “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of

God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death”?55

I realize that such questions sound far-fetched, particularly for Baptists who claim to have been in Sunday School since cradle role. But can we afford any longer simply to assume that the practices and precedents of the past will continue to be honored in the years to come as they were by our parents and grandparents before us? If as Martin Marty claims Baptistification was the dominant pattern of American religion in the last century,56 then custom designed deities seem to be the current trend. More and more people are looking to fashion their own god, one that, according to the Washington Post, is “a gentle twin of the one they grew up with. He is wise but soft-spoken, cheers them up when they’re sad, laughs at their quirks. He is, most essentially, validating, like the greatest of friends…the God they choose is more like a best friend who has endless time for their needs, no matter how trivial.”57 What these discriminating shoppers of spiritual goods and services finally want to know is, How will believing in this god improve my quality of life? Bottom line, what does this deity do for me?58

Now obviously Mullins never had the commodification of religion in mind when he prescribed soul competency as the antidote for authoritarianism, ecclesiastical or otherwise. But as a child of his time and place, he assumed that individuals unencumbered by “popery” would still basically turn out all right because they innately possessed a timeless inner core that

55 “The Barmen Declaration,” in Creeds of the Churches, ed. John H. Leith (Atlanta: John Knox, 1963, 1973), 518– 522. 56 Martin E. Marty, “Baptistification Takes Over,” Christianity Today 27 (September 2, 1983) 33-36. 57 Hanna Rosin, “Beyond 2000: Many Shape Unique Religions at Home,” Washington Post, Jan 17, 2000 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/A58347-2000Jan17.html) A1. 58 Robert Jenson points out that the maxim beloved by most Protestants, that to know God is to know God’s benefits, makes sense only when God’s identity is already well established. In our context, says Jenson, this maxim “is plainly false and has been a disaster for the church.” Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51 n. 68. Caught up in the Authorial Void 27 provided them with an unquenchable source of reason and value. This autonomous individual supposedly afforded a sure foundation for our actions and affections, and also provided an adequate basis for our relations with our neighbors. In short, Mullins believed that because of the innate competency of the unfettered soul people do not have to learn how to relate to God and their fellow creatures. This is indeed a curious assertion given the fact that competency in every other human endeavor must be acquired through submission to some kind of authoritative form of instruction.

Such assumptions seemed reasonable in Mullins’s day because he and his fellow Baptists, particularly those in the American South, were heirs to a residual stock of church practices and convictions that tacitly underwrote their confidence in the existence of the naturally competent soul. In a “Christ-haunted” society that paid homage to (if not often bothering to read) “the

Good Book,” he could be excused if he saw no need for an authorizing tradition and institutional structures (oblivious to the de facto authorities already firmly in place). Mullins did not foresee that the working hypothesis of a universal man instantiated in every individual, conferring spiritual competency apart from some sort of normative instruction, would prove false. He did not even contemplate the possibility that women and men are historical all the way through,59 nor did he anticipate a time when the holy ghost (nota bene: not Holy Spirit) would be exorcised from the public square.

At one time, then, anti-credalism was a tacit creed (any belief or set of beliefs that functions institutionally as a principle of exclusion) that virtually all Baptists in the South could affirm without fear of stumbling into the authorial void, but the social conditions that made it possible is no longer in place.60 This ethos deceived us into thinking that we could forever forgo

59 Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, eds. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 258. 60 Anti-credalism is also inseparable from anti-Catholicism, which, no matter how one tries to finesse it, is the one prejudice still socially acceptable among far too many Baptists. Caught up in the Authorial Void 28 the admittedly contentious yet irreplaceable work of theological reflection, for which the creeds and writings of church fathers and mothers provide an invaluable source. “Theology divides, missions unite” was the slogan, and so we neglected our doctrinal and ethical knitting for decades. In this regard the popular distinction between creeds that are unduly “prescriptive” and confessions that only “describe” what all Baptists believe (or at least all real Baptists, but of course to add that qualifier immediately begs the question) no longer suffices. Any such attempt to delimit what is distinctively Baptist, however well meaning or sincere, will either be a form of nostalgia for a time and a culture that no longer exist, or it will have to be enforced as a creed.

The truth of the matter is that the doctrine of soul competency flows from a stream, the source of which is neither heaven nor the mythical little man inside our heads. The spring was instead a social ethos that once governed everyday life in the towns and cities of the American

South. The moral conventions of this ethos did indeed stipulate that each soul is competent to judge for itself its own relationship with God, but did so by circumscribing the content of that relationship to ensure that it fell within the carefully demarcated boundaries. As a result, soul competency not only co-existed for decades in relative harmony with Jim Crow segregation, but as Charles Marsh documents in his book God’s Long Summer, it could also be conscripted to support its racist measures.61

Mullins was also mistaken when he took this ethos to be a permanent feature of the

American political landscape, for as it turns out it was a contingent form of accommodation to a version of liberal democracy to which many and probably most Americans now no longer subscribe. Many of our Baptist forebears assumed in this regard that Christian faith had been finally liberated from all political entanglements through the institutional separation of church

61 See Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially the chapter on Douglas Hudgins, 82–115. Caught up in the Authorial Void 29 and state. However, what often has gone unnoticed since that time is that the formal separation of these institutions took place under the auspices of a social arrangement that sanctioned a moral and cultural identity between mainline Protestant Christianity and the liberal nation-state.

Church and state may indeed have been organized separately, but their respective spheres of influence were coordinated within a social order that only paid lip service to the God of Jesus

Christ. In this arrangement the state did indeed claim a de jure neutrality concerning religion, but it continued to preside “over a de facto integration of Protestant piety, belief, and polity within the democratic ethos.”62 Bonhoeffer, drawing on his own experience in America, rightly contends that in such an arrangement “no real distinction has ever been drawn…between the offices of Church and state.” The claim that true Christianity and democracy flow from the same life-giving stream “ends only with the total capitulation of the Church to the world.”63

Tradition and Dissent

What then precisely am I talking about when I refer to a recovery of tradition as the only way to escape the authorial void? A suitable place to begin is MacIntyre’s definition of a living tradition as “a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely about the goods which constitute that tradition.”64 In other words, the widely held view that traditions are “fixed, immutable ‘things’” that must be swallowed whole (one thinks here of

Bonhoeffer’s charge of revelational positivism against Barth65) provides precious little insight into this concept. To be sure, there is something that is handed over, the tradita: practices,

62 Vigen Guroian, Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 88. 63 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1955) 105. 64 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. 65 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 286. Caught up in the Authorial Void 30 convictions, dispositions, and the like. And yet this content is part of an activity of transmission

(traditio) that involves both those who hand it on (traditor) and those who receive it, both participating in what is both a communicative process and a deliberative practice.66

That this process of communication and deliberation involves at its core an argument is, considered formally, a good thing, for as Terrence Tilley puts it, “To be faithful to the tradition may require extensive reworking of the tradita if the tradition is to be received in a new context.”67 (One thinks here, for example, of the early church’s rather radical rereading of the

Jewish Scriptures.) A vital and vibrant tradition is in part a process by which the texts, practices, teachings and virtues that constitute the tradita are regarded, on the one hand, as having a relatively stable meaning, and on the other, as always being open to rereading. As MacIntyre describes it, “every tradition becomes to some degree a tradition of critical reinterpretation in which one and the same body of texts…is put to the question, and to successively different sets of questions, as a tradition unfolds.”68 This does not mean that the work of receiving and passing along a tradition is arbitrary, such that one can make whatever he or she wishes of it, or that every reworking of a tradition will be a happy one. It does mean that the continual interpretation and reinterpretation of a tradition, with all the untidiness this suggests, is unavoidable.

Friedrich von Hügel, a German layman of the last century, set forth in a paper on the nature of religion that he delivered at the “other place” (i.e., Cambridge) what I would argue are the three facets to a living tradition. There is, first, the historical-institutional dimension, which confronts the recipient of tradition as “a Fact and Thing,” corresponding to what Tilley calls the tradita: “The five senses then, perhaps that of touch first, and certainly that of sight most; the picturing and associative powers of the imagination; and the retentiveness of memory, are the

66 Terrence W. Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 6. 67 Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition, 29. 68 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 383. Caught up in the Authorial Void 31 side of human nature specially called forth.” This aspect—Scripture, liturgies, prayers, ecclesiastical authorities—is most in evidence in children, who believe what they see and are told, “equally, as so much fact, as something to build on.”69 Those who are uncomfortable with

Tilley’s observation that a tradition may require extensive reworking are quite likely caught up in a child-like “one-sidedness”70 that eviscerates rather than preserves the authority of a tradition.

Von Hügel characterizes the second facet as the critical-speculative, in which “the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human nature that beings to come into play.” This dimension is particularly strong during adolescence, which is a time of questioning, both of others and of oneself: “The old impressions get now more and more consciously sought out, and selected from among other conflicting ones; the facts seem to clamour for reasons to back them, against the other hostile facts and appearances, or at least against those men in books, if not in life, who dare to question or reject them.”71 Indeed, I would argue that all genuine reasoning is done within and between traditions, and more specifically, in their deliberative practices. As one might suspect, there is a one-sidedness that manifests itself here as well, this one typical of adolescents, as demonstrated by the sophomoric button that reads “Question Authority.”

By themselves, then, these first two dimensions are incomplete, each trapped in what invariably becomes forms of one-sidedness to which individuals and communities are ever vulnerable.72 Without the critical and speculative aspect, the historical and institutional dimension is blind; without the historical and institutional element, the critical and speculative side is empty. Von Hügel identifies a third dimension that he associates with mature adulthood,

69 Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923; New York: Crossroad, 1999), 1:51. 70 Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 154. 71 Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 1:52. 72 Lash, Easter in Ordinary, 154. Caught up in the Authorial Void 32 called the mystical-operative.73 Here neither “fact” nor “reason” forms the beginning and end of faith, nor are they progressively transcended and left behind as ontogeny recapitulates modernity’s phylogenic myth (as James Fowler contends in Stages of Faith74), but are put into play in the service of the pursuit of wisdom as part of what Nicholas Lash calls contemplative practice,75 and which Bonhoeffer calls discipleship.

When we approach the work of tradition in the life of the church in this manner, it is relatively easy to see how dissent (as opposed to resistance) plays an important role in this process. A tradition in good working order requires well-reasoned dissent, not only for its own sake alone, but for truth’s sake. In this context dissent must be grounded, not in taste, preference or custom (“We’ve never done it that way before”), but in conscience, which in accordance with the mainstream Christian tradition is always inviolable (and thus it has an absolute negative authority) but never infallible (that is, it possesses a relative positive authority, with the corresponding obligation to set aside and correct it when it is marred by remediable ignorance).76

Baptists have much to learn from this catholic tradition, but we also have something meaningful to offer to the other communions as they struggle to be faithful to Christ. For example, the dissent of seventeenth century Baptists was rooted in their conviction (which they shared with Roman Catholics) that the king had exceeded temporal powers granted to him by 73 Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 2:393–94. 74 James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981). 75 Lash, Easter in Ordinary, 156. 76 John Henry Newman thus asserts that the authority of the teaching office of the Church, including that of the Pope, is founded upon the reverberations of the Divine Sovereign and Judge in conscience: “Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.” There is an inviolable integrity and foundational character to conscience such that a person ought never to violate the dictates of conscience, even if—though only after intensive self-examination and prayer—it goes against the teachings of a Pope: “So indeed it is; did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim the moral law, and to protect and strengthen that ‘Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world’. On the law of conscience and its sacredness are founded both his authority in theory and his power in fact.” John Henry Newman, A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke Of Norfolk (London: B. M. Pickering, 1895), 57–60. Caught up in the Authorial Void 33

God when he claimed authority over the church in England. King Charles I, for example, had declared in 1628 that,

Being by God’s ordinance…Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church within these our dominions, we hold it most agreeable to this our kingly office and our own religious zeal, to conserve and maintain the Church committed to our charge in unity of true religion and the bond of peace; and not to suffer un- necessary disputations, altercations or questions to be raised which may nourish factionalism both in the Church and commonwealth.77

When the first Baptists rejected the claim of the English crown to rule over the church they were not inventing from whole cloth (or simply retrieving from the New Testament) a new way of thinking about the relationship of worldly authorities to the life of the church. They instead recovered and reworked elements of the earlier tradition which, in keeping with the Old

Testament and the rabbinic tradition, relativized the role that the rulers and authorities of this world played in the unfolding of history. The claim of temporal authorities78 to be the determinative players on the stage of history was set aside, and like Cyrus (Is. 44:28–45:4, 13), recast instead as supporting characters. They had been granted the right or power of the sword

(ius or potestas gladii), which they were to use to help preserve a rebellious and chaotic world until, as Paul puts it, “Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith” (Gal 3:24).79 These authorities served this function by pursuing certain legitimate yet limited goods, e.g., restraining evil through the use of coercive justice, facilitating the production and exchange of material goods through the institutions of private property, and in general maintaining social cohesion so that the church could proclaim the gospel unhindered.

77 “The King’s Declaration,” in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 481. 78 The idea of “temporal” signified that the coercive force of worldly authorities was ‘temporarily’ necessary while creation awaited the second coming of Christ. 79 See Lester L. Field, Jr., Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords: On the Origins of Western Political Theology (180–398) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 45–9. Caught up in the Authorial Void 34

This sense of the present time and the role played by temporal authorities is rooted theologically in a certain, dare I say apocalyptic quality—a radically eschatological modus vivendi—that typified the understanding of the world espoused by Baptists, at their origins if not now.80 Within this apocalyptically-framed hermeneutical surmise there is an abiding awareness that church and world are not presently ordered to the same ends,81 a fact with which communions more firmly rooted in the Constantinian arrangements of Christendom continue to struggle. And due to this awareness there is a decidedly conversionist aspect to Baptist life and thought, the need for “one’s own turnabout from darkness to light” that is more prominent in the free-church tradition.82

Meaningful dissent thus makes sense only within this context of shared practices and judgments. In other words, it is part of a cooperative practice, a form of participation in an ongoing communal endeavor. The point of argument within a tradition is not ultimately to

“win,” which would locate it instead in the context of a competitive agon and not that of a polis or oikos seeking to bear witness to the triune God. As depicted by Henry Fonda’s character in the movie Twelve Angry Men, the aim of argument in such a cooperative endeavor must always be to persuade and to persuade as a community seeks to come to one mind with respect to the truth. And as this analogy to the jury room suggests, argumentative deliberation always takes place in a context with recognized rules and patterns of authority.

80 For example, in Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), Mark R. Bell records how large numbers of Baptists in the first half of the seventeenth century joined with the so-called Levellers, advocating a complete, apocalyptic overturn of the existing social order. It was only after the Cromwell government recognized them that they gave up this line of action and became culturally established, a trend among Baptists that is even more evident in the United States. 81 Christians of course need to co-operate with their fellow creatures in obtaining those things that belong to their mortal nature—what we shall eat, what shall we drink, what we shall wear. But as Augustine observes, they will seek these things according to a faith, love, and hope that is different from those affirmed by the citizens of the earthly city. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, XVIII.54, XIX.17, ed. R. W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 908, 947. 82 James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology, vol. 3, Witness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), 358. Caught up in the Authorial Void 35

Conclusion

There is one other aspect to our deliberations about tradition that I must mention in conclusion.

To state what will seem at first glance to be blatantly obvious, we live in the twenty-first century, not the seventeenth, nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries. We no longer live in a

“Christian” social order (though admittedly pockets of a Christ-haunted civilization persist, particularly in the American South). Carlyle Marney rightly notes that, “The world around us is no longer a center of frontier individualism. It has become metropolitan. It has become pluralistic. It has become chaotic and overwhelmingly not-Christian.”83 The kinds of assumptions that Helwys, Grantham, Hutchinson, Backus, Leland, Lester, Rauschenbusch, Moon and others could make about the world and the church no longer hold for us. We Christians must make our way in what James McClendon called a tournament of narratives, including those stories that underwrite the authority of the state and the market.

In these circumstances neither withdrawal into a life-style enclave nor neo-Constantinian accommodation to expectations and values promoted by the rulers of states and proprietors of the global market will suffice to preserve and promote our witness to Christ. Also ruled out is the sort of denominational self-sufficiency that scoffs at tradition and eschews the need for other branches of the church. Together with all our separated sisters and brothers, Baptists must set aside the separative logic that has governed the church since the sixteenth century. This logic contradicts Christ’s mandate that the members of his body should love each other in a way that relies on the other in visible unity. Ephraim Radner, in End of the Church: A Pneumatology of

83 Carlyle Marney, Priests To Each Other (Philadelphia: Judson, 1974; Greenville, SC: Smyth & Helwys, 1991), 7. Parenthetically, Marney rejected the notion that each of us is competent to deal with God for her- or himself, labeling it a “bastard individualism.” Ibid., 6. Caught up in the Authorial Void 36

Christian Division in the West, rightly condemns this willful refusal to maintain the bonds of ecclesial unity.84

Among Protestants, and Baptists in particular, there is a persistent and pervasive tendency to pit what should be seen as complimentary aspects of Christian life and thought against one another in a way that perpetuates the pernicious effects of this separative logic: Bible versus tradition, personal experience versus ecclesiastical authority, feeling versus intellect, spontaneity versus liturgy, discipleship versus doctrine, evangelism versus spiritual formation, apostolic office versus apostolic teaching, and so forth. Virtually non-existent, moreover, is any confession of the sin of denominational self-sufficiency. What is desperately needed is a generosity on our part that is humble enough to accept that we must recognize our place within and dependence on the larger church catholic, and that we have gifts which must be received by the magisterial churches with a humility generous enough to accept correction.85

84 Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI: 1998). 85 Schlabach, “The Correction of the Augustinians,” 74.

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