Healthy Congregations
The Well Church Book, by Browne Barr (Seabury, 1976, 116 pp., $7.95), New Power For the Church, by Harvey Seifert (Westminster, 1976, 175 pp., $3.95 pb), and Tomorrow’s Church, by John H. Westerhoff (Word, 1976, 130 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by Richard Quebedeaux, consultant on church renewal, United Church of Christ, Berkeley, California.
All three of these writers on church renewal stand squarely—by reputation, at least—within the liberal/neo-orthodox tradition of American Protestantism. Browne Barr, who in the fifties was professor of homiletics at Yale Divinity School and a preacher of national renown, has since 1960 been senior minister of First Congregational Church of Berkeley, California, one of the largest congregations of the United Church of Christ in the West (which by evangelical standards, however, isn’t saying very much). Harvey Seifert, a United Methodist clergyman trained at Boston University, is professor of Christian ethics at the School of Theology at Claremont, California. John H. Westerhoff, another UCC minister, is associate professor of religion and education at Duke University Divinity School. He is widely regarded as the dean of liberal Protestant Christian-education theorists.
In The Well Church Book Browne Barr suggests six pervasive characteristics of a “well” congregation (i.e., one in the process of “becoming” renewed): (1) a community of faith where there is love like Christ’s; (2) the rules are flexible; (3) the truth is spoken; (4) “hearing is believing” (i.e., people are urged to engage in direct, clear, specific, and honest communication for mutual edification); (5) there is a building, rich with religious symbolism, set aside for sacred use; and (6) the doors open outward to community and world. Barr’s prose is elegant and indicative of much learning. Unfortunately, he spends little time on concrete definitions or on elaboration of his “characteristics” of a well church. And while his model for all he says is his own congregation in Berkeley, he does not tell us how well his ideas for constructing a community of faith have actually worked. Have they worked at all?
For Barr, Christian “community” is based on faith in the lordship of Christ: “The church of Jesus Christ lives and grows as it meets to acknowledge that Jesus is Lord.” Well and good. But the Christ the author refers to throughout the book is a vague entity, void of personality. He or it could be almost anyone or anything—a good idea, a mystical force, a spiritual example. Barr insists that the church include a wide variety of people with diverse theological perspectives—people more committed to the community itself, it would seem, than to Christ. I for one have yet to witness a vital Christian community of faith in which the members are unsure of who Christ really is and what he demands.
Barr wants us to work for a church where the rules are flexible. To a point, O.K. But Dean Kelley (and I with him) would argue that—today—vital, growing churches are also strict and demanding. Barr talks about the congregation where the truth is spoken but gives us no indication at all what that truth might be. Finally, he rightly suggests that the church’s door must open outward to both community and world. He pays lip service to the Christian search for social justice; yet he doesn’t give us a clue as to how Christians personally or the church corporately ought to engage in this quest. In fact, Barr’s God is much more a God of love than of justice and judgment. And what about evangelism? Barr does discuss a few techniques to attract those who are already Christians (an advertising campaign, for instance). But what about the unconverted? Conversion isn’t dealt with at all. Barr’s congregation may indeed be a well church, but this book will convince very few of it.
Harvey Seifert’s New Power For the Church—particularly the first few chapters—is more informative and much more interesting. These are the subjects of the first four chapters: (1) Declining support or growing power for the church: contemporary facts and realities. (2) Can the church be both authentic and attractive? (3) What repels or attracts modern persons? (4) What can conservative and liberal churches learn from each other? (This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.) Seifert brings together and reflects upon a good deal of important sociological data bearing on religion in America and elsewhere (e.g., that collected by Glock, Stark, Wuthnow, Hoge, and Kelley). And while his own theological position leaves much to be desired—from an evangelical perspective, anyway—Seifert provides a number of valuable suggestions on church renewal for both liberals and evangelicals.
John H. Westerhoff is surely one of the most creative Christian-education theorists and practitioners of our time. (His recent study, Will Our Children Have Faith?, published by Seabury, is downright brilliant.) Although Tomorrow’s Church is merely a “short tract” written as a resource for congregations seeking to develop a program of “Christian education for social responsibility” in the context of church renewal, it is a good one for both evangelical and liberal congregations wishing to instill a social conscience in their church-school students. Westerhoff not only presents his theories about Christian education for social responsibility but also tells us how to put them to work.
What is most amazing about Tomorrow’s Church is its extremely biblical approach (welcome relief from the bland, purely humanistic Christian-education materials dominant in liberal Protestant circles in recent years). Westerhoff gives high tribute to Sojourners and the “radical evangelicals,” and it is apparent that he has been influenced deeply by them (reading this work will convince anyone that evangelicals no longer have a corner on “proof-texting”). Tomorrow’s Church is full of quotable statements. On conversion, for instance: “We have expected too much of nurture. We can nurture persons into institutional religion, but not into mature Christian faith. The Christian faith by its very nature demands conversion.” “Church education for conversion means helping persons to see that they are called not only to believe the church’s affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, but to commit their lives to him and live as his apostles and disciples in the world.” For a prominent Christian-education professional within liberal Protestantism to say that “many of us within mainline Protestantism have discovered our spiritual poverty, and rediscovered the authority of the gospel message and its call to conversion” is most encouraging.
The recent weakening of membership, stewardship, youth ministry, and Christian education in the historic denominations may, ultimately, be a blessing in disguise for them. Many liberal Protestant theologians and church leaders (including Seifert and Westerhoff) are for the first time looking to evangelicals for help in church renewal (even Browne Barr expresses great delight with the Wittenburg Door and its editors’ ability to laugh at themselves and their evangelical sisters and brothers). The question for evangelicals, then, is simple: how will we respond to this open door?
Radical Discipleship
Agenda For Biblical People, by Jim Wallis (Harper & Row, 1976, 145 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, assistant professor of religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.
Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners (formerly called Post American), has written a passionate, homiletically styled plea for a radical Christianity—one rooted in a common shared life and issuing forth in a public life-style of servanthood. In setting forth his case, the journalist distinguishes between supporters of establishment Christianity (whether conservative or liberal) and those who are practitioners of biblical faith.
Believing that the renewal of the Church is a necessity, Wallis states that this can come about only as the Spirit reconstitutes the Church as a true community based on Christ’s vision of the kingdom of God. The Church must separate itself from the entrancing power of all ideologies and systems (both political and economic) and seek to be radically obedient to Jesus Christ. Only in this way will it find a style of ministry that can display the continuing power of God in the world—a style modeled on the cross. This sort of discipleship will make it necessary for the Church to approach the world as a permanent alien, as a sojourner ever seeking to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
Perhaps the best way to introduce Wallis’s book is to quote from it. The following lines are representative: “Biblical faith is subversive.” “The people of the nonindustrial world are poor because we are rich.” “The God of the Bible is clearly and emphatically on the side of the poor, the exploited, and the victimized.” “The lordship of Christ over all of human life and affairs … is not only a personal but a structural and political fact of reality.” The church of Jesus Christ is at war with the systems of the world, not detente, ceasefire, or peaceful coexistence, but at war.”
The language of this book is uncompromising and often offensive (take this word in either sense you like, depending upon how you feel about Wallis’s position!). Even supporters of radical Christian community and Christian political critique are likely to feel that Wallis is stating his position as extremely as possible. Perhaps he intends in this way to prove prophetic within the Christian community, but the result may be otherwise. This style will most likely serve to reinforce existing prejudices among more conservative Christians rather than to foster exploration of this crucial topic by the whole Christian community.
The writing is also repetitive. One begins to feel that what could have been a provocative long essay has unnecessarily been expanded to book length. And the argument is more circuitous than straightforward. The reader may become impatient at the seeming lack of direction.
I am in basic sympathy with Wallis’s understanding of Christian discipleship. But I fear that by presenting his views as he does here he runs the risk that what should be of central concern to all Christians will instead be relegated to evangelicalism’s radical fringe. In other words, his insights into a life-style of discipleship are stronger than the case he develops for them.
Wallis’s ideas follow familiar terrain for those evangelicals who have become sensitive to the Church’s need for both a better quality of common life and a greater breadth of social involvement. The sources he quotes are the standard bookshelf holdings of “young evangelicals”—Ellul, Bonhoeffer, Yoder, Stringfellow, Berrigan, Moltmann, Merton, Martin Luther King, Gordon Cosby, Karl Barth, Clarence Jordan, Rene Padilla; Hendrik Berkhof’s book Christ and the Powers will be the only unfamiliar source many encounter.
Wallis blends insights from the politics of the left with the concerns of those involved in charismatic, communal lifestyles. He has profited from both parties’ critique of the status quo. The book is a ground-clearing effort that seeks to move the Church from an individualistic approach to faith to a shared common life, and from an idolatrous acceptance of American political and economic life to an alternative Christian political style.
Wallis adequately performs an autopsy on present “God and country” Christianity and effectively provides an alternative vision of Christ’s future kingdom. But his conception of how this kingdom can best be translated into present reality—that is, the exact nature of his reconstruction of community life and social involvement—is open to debate. For example, he states that the Christian can maintain the tension between a radical criticism of all political systems and a simultaneous, continued, and spirited political concern by carving out a Christian “political” alternative to the secular system. But isn’t it necessary, for the sake of the exploited and victimized, also to work within the “corrupt” political system, effectively garnering power for human ends?
Wallis seems to reject such realpolitik, stating that Christians must follow the biblical example of Jesus, who similarly rejected all solutions based on political power in his day. But will such a hermeneutical approach to Scripture hold up under close scrutiny? Does the fact that Jesus did not fight Rome mean that the confessing Christians in Germany in World War II should have remained non-political? The political and economic situation in Jesus’ day helped shape his approach to social involvement. That twentieth-century Christianity should follow Jesus’ program, in addition to his call to discipleship, needs a better defense than Wallis provides.
The Mystical Side Of Luther
Luther and the Mystics, by Bengt R. Hoffman (Augsburg, 1976, 285 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological School, Dubuque, Iowa.
Bengt Hoffman challenges recent Luther scholarship in his contention that Luther can best be understood in the light of his indebtedness to the German mystics of the fifteenth century, especially Johann Tauler and the author of the Theologica Germanica. Against such scholars as Ebeling, Hoffman maintains that these mystics continued to exert a positive influence on Luther even after his formal break with the Catholic Church. However, not all mystics were appreciated by Luther; he repudiated the Neo-Platonic mystics like Dionysius and accepted Romantic mystics such as Gerson and Bernard of Clairvaux only with reservations. From the mystics he derived such notions as deus absconditus (the hidden God), the darkness of faith, and the temptation to despair (Anfechtung).
In Hoffman’s judgment, the anti-mystical and anti-supernaturalistic bent of modern thought has prevented scholars from discerning and appreciating the mystical side of Luther. He is rigorous in his criticism not only of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy but also of Lutheran scholastic orthodoxy, which interpreted faith as rational assent rather than an inward experience characterized by awe and rapture.
While Hoffman rightly discerns that Luther profited from a study of the mystics, he does not do justice to the discontinuity between Luther’s spirituality and Catholic mysticism. In assessing the relation of the Reformation churches to mysticism, he tends to see the polarity in terms of the conceptual vs. the experiential. In my opinion, the more fundamental distinction lies in an emphasis on the sovereignty of grace vs. human preparation. Hoffman makes a not very successful attempt to refute those who charge the mystics with synergism, the belief that the sinner can freely cooperate with God in procuring his salvation.
Hoffman is on firm ground when he claims that the new birth as well as the forensic declaration of righteousness was included in Luther’s understanding of justification. Yet he fails to recognize that it is precisely this latter point that separates Luther from the mystics. Was not this rediscovery of the Pauline concept of the justification of the ungodly the unique contribution of the mainline Protestant Reformers, and is not this one of the hallmarks of evangelical spirituality?
Hoffman would have strengthened his case had he taken into consideration the thesis of Anders Nygren that the love rediscovered by Luther, the agape of the New Testament, was quite different from the caritas of the mystics, which signified a synthesis of agape and eros, the self-regarding unitive love of Hellenistic religion and philosophy. Nygren in his Agape and Eros perhaps overstates the cleavage between the two types of love; he also does not deal adequately with the idea of love toward God, which is also in the New Testament. Yet it seems to me that Hoffman has to provide some kind of answer to Nygren if we are to believe that Luther is a product of German mysticism.
Another scholar whom Hoffman would have done well to acknowledge is Friedrich Heiler, who in his noted work Prayer draws a sharp distinction between Luther’s understanding of prayer and the mystical conception. Heiler appreciates the contribution of the mystics, but he nonetheless insists that Luther’s spirituality, based on a rediscovery of St. Paul, developed in a quite different direction.
Having voiced these reservations I must now go on to state that Hoffman’s work is a welcome antidote to the anti-mystical bias that has pervaded Protestant scholarship since Ritschl. Hoffman reminds us that there is a mystical dimension to faith, though faith as such must not be reduced to mystical experience. Faith is not simply a rational acknowledgment of the claims of God but a spiritual communion with the living presence of God, a communion that transcends the confines of reason. Hoffman points out that Luther himself distinguished between “historical faith” and “true faith,” which entails immediate, direct feeling. Moreover, many of the mystics who exerted a profound influence on Luther were devoted to a study of the Word of God and were staunch believers in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Where Luther broke with the mystics was in their dependence on Neo-Platonic philosophy, which caused them to underplay the historical character of revelation and the personalistic character of God.
Hoffman is also to be congratulated on his call for a reappreciation of the Pietists, who were probably closer to the real Luther than their orthodox opponents. He convincingly maintains that men like Arndt, Spener, and Francke bore witness to an “experienced wisdom” that lay within, not outside, Luther’s perception of faith. The Pietists were quick to acknowledge their indebtedness to the mystics, but they were uncompromising in their adherence to sola gratia and sola fide. Their call to renewed dedication and to a deeper life of prayer was the key to their intense social involvement and to their missionary outreach, which enabled Protestantism to advance throughout the world.
Hoffman’s book merits careful reading. It is a significant contribution to Luther studies and has far-reaching ecumenical significance, since it indisputably shows that the Catholic mystics were a major formative influence on Luther’s thought. Yet we must keep in mind that Luther was discriminating in his use of the mystics and that his theology and spirituality had their primary basis in Scripture.
Victorian Evangelicals
The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, by Ian C. Bradley (Macmillan, 1976, 224 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, director of the Mellander Library and assistant professor of theology, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.
This is one of the most intriguing books I have read in recent months. Though solid and scholarly (more in content than in format), it was difficult to put down. Beyond the publisher’s somewhat slanderous dust-jacket copy (blaming the Evangelicals for nearly everything wrong with the Victorians) lies a balanced and illuminating study of British Evangelicalism during its heyday, 1800–1860.
By “Evangelicalism” the author means the party in the Anglican church led by William Wilberforce. He self-consciously excludes Methodism, Nonconformity, and other forms of dissent—and hence weights his study toward the middle and upper classes, the established Evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, the halls of Parliaments, and so on. Among the topics covered are the campaign to convert the nation, the implicit “assault on the church,” the mission to the heathen, the war against vice, the proliferation of philanthropic societies, the evangelical concerns for “conduct,” and the vision for home and family. Each topic is elaborated with pertinent data and illustrations (often, interesting enough, drawn from Victorian literature written by children of Evangelicals—to which a minimum of interpretation is added with a light touch.
Bradley (who now works for the BBC) seems to have few axes to grind. He apparently became interested in the topic by chance in pre-university days, followed it up with an Oxford dissertation on the Evangelicals in Parliament, and has now produced this study. Though recognizing both strengths and weaknesses, he concludes that “in the period with which the book is concerned, Evangelicalism was essentially a dynamic movement and the influence which it exerted on society was, on the whole, a positive one.”
He also debunks the debunkers, claiming that “recent attempts to debunk the abolition movement and to call into question the motives of those engaged in it have failed to provide any substantial evidence to support their case” and concluding that “the traditional view is, for once, the right one—the abolition movement was a supremely altruistic crusade carried out almost entirely under Evangelical leadership and inspiration.” And he quotes approvingly the words of the Earl of Shaftesbury that “most of the great philanthropic movements of the century have sprung from them.”
But those of us who stand more directly in the wake of such Evangelical movements will find again and again our own mores, conflicts, and tensions illuminated and clarified. Here are the rise of the Sunday school movements and the development of the “tracts” that still appear on our street corners. Here is the puzzle of an apparently world-denying asceticism bent to very worldly goals and social “usefulness.” Here is a heart-felt mission to the “heathen” implicitly supporting British “imperialism.” Here are roots of the modern British welfare state—in the efforts of Evangelicals to push the state toward ever more complete regulation of life (Sabbatarianism, for example), the relief of poverty, or the suppression of vice. Here is a call to integrity and earnestness that could, especially after the initial dynamic waned, quickly degenerate into hypocrisy and cant in a later era. Here are the great evangelical philanthropic endeavors that only occasionally broke through to the insight that society itself needed restructuring.
Of particular interest is Bradley’s attempt to define “Evangelicalism”—an attempt that will sound somewhat strange to those of us accustomed to the modern nuances of the word since the American fundamentalist-modernist controversy. His title expresses the major synonym for “evangelical” in this era: “serious.” The movement was a call to “vital religion” or “earnest Christianity.” Its enemy was not so much “liberalism” as “worldliness or complacency”—whether “conservative” or “liberal.” To be sure, it emphasized human depravity, conversion, sanctification, Providence, and so on, but “Evangelicalism was never really a theological system so much as a way of life … a series of vivid and compelling personal experiences.” The Evangelicals “unreservedly devoted themselves to God,” to use the words of Wilberforce; for them religion involved “turning the whole mind to God,” as Hannah More put it.
These themes reverberate, of course, in Methodism and other aspects of the Evangelical Revival excluded from this study, and I wonder if on this level, at least, there is not more unity in these currents than Bradley implies. But on other levels there might be a greater diversity. While reading this book, one longs for fuller comparison with evangelical currents (like Methodism) at work in other classes—and occasionally more “radical” because less “established.”
The reader also longs for a sequel to this book that would describe the out-workings of Evangelicalism in successive eras. The author gives only a few hints of his understanding, but he clearly sees a decline after 1860 that did “irreparable harm not only to their cause but to the credibility of Christianity itself.” Bradley suggests that “the Second Evangelical Revival, which began around 1858, radically changed the character of the movement and inspired adherents who were more fanatical, more bigoted, and more introverted than those who followed Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.”
Bradley uses this fact to explain why so many of the children of these Evangelicals left the faith; they were reacting not only to the limitations of Evangelicalism itself but “also against a new obscurantism and fanaticism which had only recently crept into it.” What he has in mind here is apparently the shift in emphasis to biblical literalism and a narrowed focusing on eschatological questions and prophecy. Such suggestions would accord well with the emerging understandings of “fundamentalism” (such as in Ernest Sandeen’s Roots of Fundamentalism) and would raise some very interesting questions about the nature of the later movement, its origins, its trans-Atlantic character. They might also prod us to be more careful in distinguishing the varieties of the meaning of the world “evangelical,” especially as it is to be distinguished from “fundamentalist.”
Briefly Noted
It Will Be Worth It All: A Study in the Believer’s Reward, by Woodrow Michael Kroll (Loizeaux, 123 pp., $2.59 pb), and Order Your Crowns Now, by Bill McKees (John T. Benson, 189 pp., $4.95), are popular portrayals of all the Bible has to say about rewards for faithful service by those who have received the gift of salvation.
Although not specifically Christian, a book worth knowing about for those who wish a practical method for curing addiction is No More Butts: A Psychologist’s Approach to Quitting Cigarettes, by Richard Olshavsky (Indiana University, 181 pp., $10). In style and format this is more like a trade book than the kind that university presses customarily issue.
