How Theology Matters

Theology means struggle. It may begin as Bonhoeffer said in silence, but when the silence is broken, a battle begins. This seems regrettable; in matters of great moment, the human heart yearns ceaselessly for secure truth, and it is easy for us to believe that unchallenged beliefs are self-evident truths. A little reflection, however, will show that this is not so; in fact we very often have believed without doubt or contradiction what turn out to be mere falsehoods. (It is small enough comfort to know that other people do the same.) Thus when we set out upon Christian theology or ethics we must be reconciled to the fact that here as elsewhere hard truth is not available without hard struggles.

The struggle begins with the humble fact that the church is not the world. This means that Christians face an interior struggle, inasmuch as the line between church and world passes right through each Christian heart. It nevertheless means that the standpoint, the basic point of view, the theology of the church is not the standpoint, basic point of view, theology of the world. The church's story will not interpret the world to the world's satisfaction. Hence there is a temptation (no weaker word will do) for the church to deny her "counter, original, spare, strange" starting point in Abraham and Jesus and to give instead a self-account or theology that will seem true to the world on the world's own terms. Surely, this temptation murmurs, the salvation of the world must rest on some better foundation than tales about an ancient nomad and stories of a Jewish healer? The strength of this worldly appeal lies in its claim to the universal—an appeal which faith must also make in its own way. The vice in the world's approach to universal truth is that it abandons the truth available to Christians, which is that the church is not the world, its story not the world's accepted story, its theology not the world's theology. If we yield this point, conspiring to conceal the difference between church and world, we may in the short run entice the world, but we will do so only by betraying the church.

A second humble fact is that Christianity itself is not one congruent whole. If the world is divided, so is the church. Who can recite the great unity passages such as Ephesians 4:5, "One Lord, one faith, one baptism," without being reminded of the historical reality: A thousand warring sects, schism and heresy, division and excommunication, all justified in the name of the aforesaid one Lord. And if someone sees in this variety and struggle no great scandal but instead a healthy living diversity of religion; or if someone claims to see here and there in the diversity some true Christian essence now and again appearing; or if someone claims by whatever means to discern amidst the variety some true path of historic faithfulness, some True Church, with other paths relegated to heterodoxy; or if someone sees the great variety of ways grouped according to a few main types, each bearing witness to a part of the Christian truth but no type witnessing to all the truth—in each case the main difficulty remains. A divided Christianity yields divided theologies. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose systematic approach to theology entitles him to the role of father of modern theology, argued that any given theology must represent and refer to the doctrine of some particular Christian body at some particular time. (It fell to successors more modern but less theological than Schleiermacher to abstract from church to individual, making theology mere organized subjectivity.) He said that since there was in his day no "systematic connection" between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, a theology could not be Christian in general, but must in the West be either Catholic or Protestant (Schleiermacher, CF §19).

Some might hope that Schleiermacher was wrong and that theology today has overcome denominational barriers. Yet the facts now (and then) are even more complex than he said. For example, there is Eastern Orthodoxy, maintaining a traditional life nearly two millennia old, with a rich theology of image and mystery remote from the understanding of the West, though some Westerners imagine they find in it a perfect fit. Then there is the Anglican tradition, claiming to be both Catholic and Protestant. And there are the younger churches in mission lands, propagated or cross-bred from earlier communions in fertile cultural environments that make in each case their own living contribution to these theologies. Arthur Piepkorn in his massive four-volume survey of religious bodies (1977– 79) counted at that time more than five hundred "bodies" or denominations of Christians in the United States and Canada alone!

Yet of these five hundred bodies nearly one hundred, according to Piepkorn, are "Churches with origins in the Radical Reformation," while almost 300 more are Holiness and Pentecostal, Evangelical and Fundamentalist bodies—many of which have roots in that same radical soil. This statistic may underline the schismatic tendency of these strains of church life, but it also underlines the difficulty of the theological task—shall there be close to four hundred different theologies for these alone in each theological generation? Surely, though, what Schleiermacher had in mind by distinct "churches" was more nearly akin to Piepkorn's broad divisions, such as "Lutheran Churches," "Reformed and Presbyterian Churches," and (of special interest here) "the Churches of the Radical Reformation." A Christian theology, we may say provisionally, must have a community of reference that cannot without confusion be subsumed under some more general ecclesial type; it must be Orthodox or Protestant or Catholic or the like. Historical scholarship since Schleiermacher's day has made it certain that the Christian bodies of the Radical Reformation do in fact constitute such a distinctive type. At the center of the Radical Reformation—a term made familiar by George H. Williams (1992)—are the Wiedertäufer (Anabaptists, i.e., those who it was said "illegitimately repeated" baptism), or, as they preferred to say, brethren, or Täufer (in standard English, simply baptists). My project will be especially related to this baptist focus of Christian life. Others have with reason named this community of reference the "Free Church" (Littell, 1952; Westin, 1954), or the "Believers' Church" (Durnbaugh, 1968; Garrett, ed., 1969), or the "Left Wing" of the Reformation, the name preferred by Roland Bainton (1941), yet "baptist" (or the more prejudicial term "anabaptist") has more history in its favor, and I propose staying with it. Yet the quest should also be of great interest to those who do not see themselves as heirs of the baptist vision, for if this vision is even a part of the light reflected from Christ's face, we all want to know the quality of that reflected light, inasmuch as we want to see finally that one face.

These historical discoveries about the early baptists have not been easily achieved. From the sixteenth century until the present, fierce controversy has swirled around the Radical Reformers and their successors. So fierce were these controversies that some of the successors, such as Baptists, long preferred whenever possible to dissociate themselves from their Radical forebears (Hudson, 1953), though Glen Stassen has repeatedly shown that the claim for Baptist independence from Anabaptists is historically mistaken (1962, 1998a, 1998b). Who, then, were the Radicals? What did they do and believe? What were their origins? What were their just deserts? These battles still rage, and some of them must be engaged below. A preliminary observation, however, may find general consent: Their contemporaries regarded the so-called Anabaptists as dangerous. This is an undisputed fact. They were seen as a danger to society, to politics, to the religious fabric of Europe. Yet they were with few exceptions nonviolent, that is, pacifists, and individually they were widely regarded as men and women of good character. What, then, was the danger? From today's perspective perhaps we cannot say. That we cannot may be a measure of the difference between the late Middle Ages and our times, and hence of the difference the original Radicals did make despite their short life tenure.

Yet the question should not be too quickly abandoned. For if we can penetrate their times, seeing that which was central to them but noxious to the religious and political authorities, picking out the hinges on which their story turned, we may be able to see the ways in which our story is like or unlike theirs, and the ways in which a theology in light of the baptist vision must have a distinctive (dangerous?) shape and scope. Before pursuing that vision further, though, it will be helpful to say a few things about theology itself. I propose here (§1) to find why baptists until now have produced so little theology of the usual sort, and (§2) in remedy to locate an organizing center, 'the prophetic or baptist vision,' for such a theology. Then (§3) I will provide some initial, orienting remarks about this (or any) theology's matter and method, and finally (§4) justify, if I can, what may seem the oddity of setting ethics first in order of treatment.

§1. Why baptists Have Produced So Little Theology

A baptist community of reference may seem unpromising, for compared to others the sharers of the Radical vision have produced only a little formal theology (Freeman et al., 1999:Intro.). Two of the necessary tasks of theology in this mode must be to give an adequate explanation for this dearth and to show how it may be remedied.

That there are few baptist theologies of merit will be granted by most observers. One task of the present chapter will be to indicate my predecessors in this work, but that is not a daunting duty. Some have supposed that there are so few because baptists have been in the main poor, and alienated from society, and indeed that may be a partial explanation, for like any science or intellectual discipline, theology presupposes social leisure. Yet on British and American soil some baptists have flourished economically and socially—yet without producing a theological literature proportionate to that of their Reformed or Catholic or Lutheran or Methodist counterparts. In America, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) alone has attained cosmopolitan stature—and significantly, his starting point was ethics.

a. What kind of theology is wanted.—In explaining this theological lack it will be convenient to have a relatively open notion of the territory that "theology" comprises, for definitions of theology have been proposed that implicitly or even explicitly exclude any but their own. Thus Roman Catholic Karl Rahner, by way of definition, says that "theology is a science which presupposes faith (grace of faith) and the Church (magisterium, Scripture, Tradition)" (1965)—a limit that seemingly excludes theologies in the Radical heritage. At the other extreme, it is possible to use the word "theology" so loosely that whoever has any beliefs, or any religious beliefs, may be said to have a theology. In that case, as the Dodo announces at the end of Alice's Caucus Race, "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes," but the attempt to understand theology as a determinate body of knowledge is abandoned. Clearly what is wanted is a definition of theology that avoids both extremes—one that will define theology neither as, in effect, "our theology—or whatever is sufficiently like ours to count," nor at the other extreme as "whatever is believed religiously." The judicious mean between these, however, is not easily discovered. For example, the etymological definition so tiresomely proffered beginning students (some of whom never get beyond it)—that "theology is the logos of theos," that is, ideas or discourse about God—commits both faults: it narrowly discriminates against polytheistic and atheistic theologies (and there are some), while at the same time it admits mere occasional or random religious thoughts. Those who find themselves trapped by the etymological sense of this term might try asking themselves if penitentiaries are places of meditative reflection, if economics is the science of cooking and housecleaning, or if all revolutions restore some original state of affairs—all these being definitions in a like manner based on etymology.

Terms change, and no definition should be an intellectual straitjacket. In describing a new approach to a task what is wanted is a standing definition of that task that is close enough to the traditional idea to make sense of earlier practice, one that in this case provides some help in understanding the activity in which most of those called theologians have engaged, yet one that is neither loaded in favor of some newly chosen doctrinal or methodological way, nor so restrictive that creative development is foreclosed by the very definition. It must not, in other words, be a definition of good theology or the best theology (best in the definer's view, of course), but it must enable us successfully to distinguish any and all theology from other enterprises.

Many of us have some intuitive idea of what a theology must be, regardless of formal definitions. We know that a theology represents something deeply self-involving for its adherents. Thus atheistic (or polytheistic) theologians are attending to something or other that in its importance plays for them a role in some ways like that of God. It is recognized, too, that even mystical theologies are not merely effusions of feeling, but are attempts systematically to connect mystical experience with what is and is not there in the world— or beyond it. Theology, we might say, has its objective pole, as well as its subjective one; it deals with matters of supreme importance to its partisans, yet seeks to do so in an orderly, even a scientific way.