. . . Or John Jewel and Alexander Campbell on Reformation and Restoration
Now, lest my friends Tripp and Jeff (and anyone else) accuse me of uncritical infatuation with the Orthodox Church, I wanted to alert them to the fact that I have recently received a couple of non-Orthodox books on the Church.
I recently received Alexander Campbell's Christian System in a book order. In this work, Campbell, historical forebear (with Thomas Campbell his father, and Barton W. Stone) of the Disciples of Christ denomination and the non-denominational Christian Churches and a capellaChurches of Christ (the last not to be confused with the United Churches of Christ), sets out the New Testament understanding of salvation and the Church. Written in the 1830s, it is not going to challenge the Harry Potter books for bestseller status. But it is an interesting work.
Serendipitously, I received in the mail Saturday, from an internet acquaintance, John Jewel's Apology for the Church of England [note: this link does not have chapters 2 and 4 of his work] . Jewel in this work is defending the English Church's separation from the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) on biblical and patristic grounds. Another interesting work, but again, no challenge to Potter.
Now, let me state from the outset, the most I've done with these works is scan over them and read what I thought to be significant excerpts. I have not studied their argumentation in depth.
However, there is one common thread that, if I am not mistaken, runs through them both: that somehow the Church can be rebuilt. Neither author, though Campbell comes close, would say that somehow the Church ceased to exist, say, around the time of Constantine. But the Roman Catholic corruptions (Jewel) and Protestant schisms (Campbell) at least called for Christians to get together and remake the Church along the lines of the Scripture and the Church Fathers.
There seems to me, if I am correct in my superficial glance at these two men, to be a flaw in their argument. It assumes that the Church is, like other human institutions, reformable. That is to say, they seem to view the Church as primarily an institution and secondarily an organism.
Tripp, and some others, have criticized the historic Church for its institutions which allegedly do unjust and oppressive things. I have countered, a la the recent decades of activity in ECUSA, that current institutions don't do so well in this regard either. We haven't improved the situation, only moved the problem into another arena. Or, to put it another way, it doesn't appear to me that these criticisms of past institutions are any less institutional. They assume that we can merely rewrite the flowchart of the Church and all will be made well. (Factoring in, of course, large doses of the Holy Spirit.) Indeed, perhaps it's not a matter of either/or, but rather what is conceived as being the core of the Church's being: organism or institution. Do we try to make alive the institution, or do we allow the insitution to organically grow out of the organism? It seems to me that the Campbell and Jewel views are that of the former.
The New Testament view, of course, is that the Church is an organism, not an institution. Indeed, it is all organism, for it is the Body of Christ. But just as the human body will organize itself in certain ways, thus being recognizable as human, so, too, it seems, the Church will develop certain organizations and structures so as to be recognizable as the Church. I take, by way of analogy, the views of Campbell and Jewel as being something along the lines of a doctor responding to a patient's complaint of a sore ankle with an amputation of the entire leg. "Let's get rid of all this excess stuff that gets in the way of the true essence of the Church." But one would argue, with Paul, that the foot isn't any less a part of the Church than the leg or torso.
Of course, closer readings of these texts may more helpfully alter my conceptions of their views. But I don't suppose we can ever get away from the understanding of the Church as an organism with institutions.
Posted by Clifton at January 20, 2003 12:37 PM | TrackBack