Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do

Transcription

1 Keith Watkins Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do I n 1953, the year I began my seminary studies, Charles Clayton Morrison published a provocative book on Christian unity that envisioned a post-protestant church for the United States. Morrison's thesis, which explains the title of his book, The Unfinished Reformation, is that the original reformers in Germany, Switzerland, France, and England did not intend to divide the one Church of Christ. Their goal was to overcome its wrongful developments and reform the church so that it would be what Christ intended it to be. Because of the political and social struggles of their time, however, the reformers were isolated from one another and a divided church was the result. Describing the growing interest in the ecumenical movement of his time, Morrison asserted that the Protestant churches were expressing their Reformation character as they sought to reestablish the unity of the Church of Christ on earth. In another book, published twenty years earlier, Morrison had discussed other ideas that dealt directly with the divided state of the churches of his time and place. Throughout the 1933 book, Morrison urged the churches to reclaim their gospel heritage, recover their autonomy from the social order, and move together to recover their unity. While developing a history of the Consultation on Church Union, a forty-year effort to recover the unity about which Morrison had written, I reviewed the ideas that he had presented in these two books. To my surprise, I discovered that he had anticipated some of the principles that emerged during the period after I also realize that he had anticipated some of the problems that would later cause the Consultation to fall short of its goal, which had been to develop a post-denominational church to serve the people of the United States. Keith Watkins writes on history, theology, and bicycling. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, just north of the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. hkwatkins@mac.com Copyright 2013 Keith Watkins

2 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 2 The Unfinished Reformation (1953) In this book, Morrison declares that what needed to be overcome was the denomination, which he defined as a part of the Church of Christ existing in a structure of its own and exercising by itself and for itself those functions which belong to the unity of the whole Church of Christ (56). Those functions included: baptism, ordination to the Christian ministry, Christian missions, Christian education, the church s worship, the Lord s Supper, the creed, and polity or organization. While denominations have real historical form, the Church of Christ the ecumenical church has no empirical habitation, no organization, no meeting times, no meeting places, no visibility at all which would enable [Christians] to have empirical membership in it (98). Morrison declared that the churchism of the denominations was in itself sinful because it obscured the true church just as did the hierarchical system of the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore, despite the apparent gains that the Protestant churches were making, they were actually losing ground to secularism and the Roman Catholic Church. Morrison believed that this relative decline of Protestantism was a direct result of their denominationalism. The goal of the ecumenical movement, he wrote, was the actual embodiment of the now unembodied Church of Christ (54). Organs for the church in its unity should be created so that baptism, worship, and the other functions of the church would be done by the ecumenical church rather than by and for denominations. Morrison believed that the goal could be realized in the United States. Although the Year Book of American Churches listed 256 religious bodies, 92 percent of American Protestantism was contained in the 50 denominations with 50,000 members or more. Thirty of these churches were members of the National Council of Churches, already advanced in their ecumenical hopes, and presented a sufficiently homogeneous ideology (83). By moving forward in processes already underway, a united church, embracing a large percentage of American Protestants, could come into being. Although many denominations would continue to exist, this new, large church would transcend denominationalism because it would perceive itself to be functioning as a constituent part of the evangelical Church of Christ that exists in all times and places. Morrison contrasted this new Protestant unity with that of the Roman Catholic Church asserting that both the nature of religious experience and the form of the churchly institution were radically different in a Protestant setting from what they were in the Roman Catholic. He acknowledged that traditions and fellowships, formerly institutionalized in denominations, could continue in the ecumenical church, but their churchly character would be gone. Life in the united church would be marked by loyalty and freedom. Loyalty would be connected to the

3 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 3 church s constitution, which was the Lordship of Jesus; freedom would be connected to fellowship, which was the ongoing personal relationship of Christians in their life of worship and witness. By replacing denominations with the ecumenical church, Christians would find that their relationship with Jesus was more direct and their range of freedom would be extended. Morrison believed that congregations, largely in the form that people already experienced, were basic to the church. When they were freed from their denominational responsibilities and loyalties, the actions such as baptism that took place in congregations would be perceived as those of the one Church of Christ. These transformed congregations would be one aspect of the ecumenical embodiment that Morrison envisioned. Morrison did not discuss, however, another aspect of the embodiment of the ecumenical church its structures and systems beyond the congregation. He implied that there would be leaders, such as bishops, with responsibilities that crossed congregational and geographical boundaries, yet he gave no suggestions concerning the institutional embodiment of the church at the regional and national level. In this regard, Morrison s Disciples of Christ heritage may have been showing, since the classic Disciples approach to unity was much the same: every congregation was understood to be an outcropping of the one church, while organizations beyond the congregation were transitory and incidental. Although Morrison referred to the ecumenical Christian faith of which all denominational creeds are but broken lights (62), he was determined that neither sound doctrine nor strict conformity to a pattern of church organization believed to be divinely authorized could be insisted upon in the united church. If matters of that kind were written into the church s constitution, they would last for a time but then would lead inevitably to heresy and schism. In short, a united church, so constituted, would be only another, albeit a vastly larger, denomination, beset by the same perils that have dogged Protestant history through the centuries (200). One of Morrison s interesting ideas was his classification of the Protestant denominations into two groups. The classic Protestant bodies were the three that originally came from the Reformation Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Anglican. They believed that the Church of Christ had always existed and that they were reforming it. The dissenting Protestant bodies were those that broke away from the classic groups Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ, dissenting from the Reformation itself, which they believed had not been radical enough. Instead of reforming the existing church, they conceived themselves as restoring the New Testament church in its original purity. Thus their

4 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 4 feeling of continuity with the one church was dimmed, if not neutralized (130-31). Morrison was writing prior to Vatican II, when the Roman Catholic Church was significantly different from what it was to become. In this book, he expressed the strong anti-catholic sentiment that was widespread among Protestant leaders, including those in the forefront of the liberal and progressive wings of Protestantism. Who among Morrison s counterparts today would be willing to speak as he did of this church? The Roman Catholic Church has in the course of history so radically departed from the essential character of the Christian Church that it can rightly be described in the terms used by the Reformer as an apostate church (102-3). One element from Morrison s critique of denominationalism is especially interesting to me, because of my discontent with long-standing Disciples eucharistic practice. Denominationalism, he asserted, breeds a subtle and perilous moral insincerity among Protestant Christians (42). The reasons that justified the emergence of each denomination no longer are relevant, yet the denominations remain as empty shells of once vital movements. Ministers and denominational executives are bound to maintain loyalty to their own systems, and this procedure is more or less vaguely felt to be insincere by any churchman whose mind has been even partially enlightened by the ecumenical ideal (43). Morrison deeply regretted that there is no other way for church work to be carried out except through the denominations. He acknowledged, however, that although we cannot belong to the ecumenical church, we can, and increasingly do, extend the hand of Christian fellowship across the dividing barriers of the denominational system, which was the real meaning of the widespread disregard of historical denominational standards and the enlarging hospitality to Christians of other traditions (45). The Social Gospel and the Christian Cultus Another book by Morrison, The Social Gospel and the Christian Cultus, published in 1933, twenty years earlier than The Unfinished Reformation, indicates that he had been giving serious attention to the church s broken character for a long time. The earlier book contains Morrison s Rauschenbusch lectures, delivered at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in 1932 and published the next year as the second in the series of lectures honoring the pioneering theologian of the social gospel. When he delivered these lectures, Morrison was fifty-seven years old, and his work through the Christian Century and other organizations had established him as one of the foremost leaders of liberal Protestantism. I first read The Social Gospel in 1968, thirty-five years after its publication, and reread the book

5 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 5 in 2003, seventy years after its publication. The book must have created a strong reaction among church people of Morrison s time. Morrison writes that the problem facing the church is this: Contemporary Christianity has a new gospel and an old cultus. He then reverses the statement. The new gospel is really the recovery of the earliest proclamation and the old cultus is a set of factors that came into existence long after the gospel was first proclaimed not earlier than the Constantinian transformation of the fourth century. Morrison s purpose throughout the book is to urge the church to reclaim its gospel heritage and to recover its autonomy from the social order. The primitive gospel was a vision of society that was sharply distinct from the existing societies of the world. The experience of individual salvation came as the corollary to participation in the new social order. Jesus intent had been to usher in the Kingdom of God, not to establish the church. Morrison chooses the word cultus to refer to the full range of forms that the gospel uses to accomplish its purposes: worship, theological elaboration, organizational form, and ethical thought and practice. Each of these aspects of the church s cultus needs to be reformulated, he insists, so that it can serve the social vision of the church. Morrison acknowledges that Protestant seminaries and their graduates had for a long time understood the social implications of the gospel; pastors had been preaching this understanding for a generation. Yet, churches were largely unchanged. What needed to happen was that the cultus also needed to change so that at every point in their church life members would meet the gospel of the Kingdom and be converted to a point of view that paralleled that of their pastors. In his chapter The Social Orientation of Worship, Morrison argues that it is not enough for Protestant ministers to function as prophets. They also need to function as priests who are able to develop an organized public expression of religion as an objective body of culture. A priest is seeking for ceremonial forms and rituals, for dramatic actions and modes of speech, for institutional structures, by which the living aspirations, convictions and emotions of his religion may be given objective communal expression (50 1). Morrison explicitly rules out the effort by some to recover ancient forms or to adapt aspects of Episcopal worship. Instead, we must construct new models, new pageantry, new hymns, new forms of prayer, new anthems of praise, new dramatizations in which, for example, the labor movement may be caught up in the embrace of religion, and the scientific movement, and the peace movement, and the civic conscience, and the community spirit, and the family life, and every great human aspiration of our time. These must be given a wording, a ritual, a symbolism which

6 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 6 every human aspiration and interest requires before it can be felt to be religious (68). Morrison strongly defends the importance of the church having its own technical language. Every dimension of life has its own special vocabulary. He warns against two dangers: the effort to reduce theology to its secular and vernacular minimum (73), and the attempt to translate it into another technical speech, such as the psychology of religion. What needs to be done, instead, is to take the old doctrines of the faith and open them up so that the social implications embedded in each of them is seen, experienced, and acted upon. In Morrison s use of the word, cultus included the organizational form of the church. During the Protestant Reformation, the worldwide organizational unity of the church was replaced by a sectarian point of view, based on an individualistic understanding of Christianity. The Protestant movement developed as a movement of multiple sects chiefly because it lost that orientation in the general social order which had characterized Catholicism. The public function of the Christian church was obscured and lost by virtue of internal controversy which thrust creedal distinctions into the center of Christian consciousness and, under the stimulus of the spirit of individualism, erected a separate sect for each particular creed (112). Morrison rejects the current necessity of this division and speaks hopefully of the growing readiness of the Protestant sects to move toward a recovery of unity. He stated that the churches no longer have confidence in the idea that a divinely ordained pattern for the church is revealed in the New Testament and is to be replicated in the world today. In a passage that I find remarkable, Morrison strongly supports the value of the historic episcopate as it has continued in the Episcopal Church. His defense, however, is not of a particular doctrine about the office of bishop but rather that it has maintained continuity with the church from ancient times and has preserved a ministry in the church that has a strongly positive character. Defenders of episcopacy, Morrison asserts, should abandon their untenable obscurantism, and present it on its intrinsic merits as an institution which Protestantism needs (133). He proposes five theses that Episcopalians should advance in every discussion of Christian unity: (1) the historic episcopate would give a united church a stability and competence superior to that provided by any other form of church government ; (2) it is more democratic than any other form; (3) it provides for the maximum value of the sacraments by establishing a clerical order that is distinguished from the laity and invested with a symbolic significance above and beyond [its] personal character ; (4) the morale of this order is best maintained by the order itself rather than by sharing control with the laity; and (5) its preservation through

7 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 7 the centuries, and its continued presence and availability, allow it to make a sufficient appeal to the esthetic imagination to evoke the peculiar respect and even reverence, which appropriately belongs to a true organization of religion (134 5). Morrison says that he would argue for the affirmative in all five of these positions. The debate in the churches, he suggests, is between reverence and democracy. Baptists, Disciples, and others allow that Episcopalians win on the reverence score but they claim that their churches win on the democracy score. Not so, Morrison asserts. He regrets the church s fractured condition which so cripples it that it cannot contend with the world around it. It affects young pastors. Full of enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God, they find themselves cribbed and confined in a sectarian institution whose ruling concepts are irrelevant to their ideal, and whose facilities and resources are too scant and puny to be availing. Needing a mighty sledge, they find in their hands only a fragile tackhammer. The vast forces of organized paganism stand over against our petty churches with mighty indifference. We are no match for them (141). The fourth aspect of cultus that needs reconstruction is Christian ethics and moral conduct. The problem in the churches is that what passes for ethics is support for and justification of the conventional codes of society. What the church ought to have is a cultus that stands distinctly over against existing world culture, challenging that culture itself, and pointing out the wickedness and injustice of its basic conditions (148). Morrison is especially distressed over the church s alliance with the political state and with the capitalistic system (152). Instead of standing free from the social order of the world, the church is actually patronized by the social order as a means of stabilizing and perpetuating the existing system (159). He sees contemporary practices of evangelism as evidences of this situation. Converts are not put in opposition to the standing order but instead brought through an open door into respectability. If the church were again to define itself by the mind of Christ, if could once again develop an ethics that stands in distinct opposition to the prevailing standards of society. Once again, it brings people into a new social order and the result is that they also experience individual salvation. In the last part of the book, Morrison gives specific examples of how the church could begin to disengage itself from its entanglement with the political and economic system. It could disavow war and institutionally express this declaration by withdrawing its support of the military chaplaincy. Its resistance to the economic system could be expressed by refusing to develop endowments for institutions and pension funds. Although these examples gave bite to his argument, they

8 Christian Unity: Completing What the Reformers Tried To Do 8 probably indicated to most readers that much of what Morrison was urging upon them was impossible to do. Organizing to Unite America s Churches Several years prior to writing The Unfinished Reformation, Morrison had become an active participant in an attempt to put these principles into action. He helped to shape a venture that most people referred to as The Greenwich Plan, named for the city in Connecticut where the meetings were held. Beginning in 1946 and continuing until 1958, this program was the attempt by a fluctuating number of Protestant churches (at the high point, there were nine) to unite in a manner that expressed some of the principles that Morrison had articulated. His primary contribution was to serve as primary writer of the document on which the churches would come together as a new kind of united church. From the beginning, the Greenwich enterprise failed to attract the attention that it needed in order to create a united Protestant church. In 1950, while this venture was still showing promise, Morrison described it at some length in an essay entitled The Ecumenical Trend in American Protestantism that was published in The Ecumenical Review, a journal sponsored by the World Council of Churches Two years later, however, Presbyterian leader Eugene Carson Blake proposed a new venture, which from its beginning, attracted the serious attention of church leaders and the general public. In 1961, when this second initiative was established, it adopted a name that was similar to the official name of the Greenwich Plan: The Consultation on Church Union. By this time, Morrison, now 87 years of age, had largely relinquished his active leadership role in church affairs. Nevertheless, ideas that he had been discussing for more than thirty years were at the heart of the proposal that Blake had made in his famous sermon at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, in Indirectly, however, Morrison s ideas continued to influence the efforts of the churches to move past their denominationalism. The Ecumenical Trend in American Protestantism, The Ecumenical Review 3, no. 1 (October 1950), The Social Gospel and the Christian Cultus (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933). The Unfinished Reformation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953).