(Author’s note: This post can be considered Part II of a two-part series on ways of enforcing orthodoxy in Christianity today. Part I tackled the issue of created spiritual sameness by provoking differently-minded people to leave a church and can be found here. –E.A.)
Enforcing orthodoxy necessitates having orthodoxy to enforce. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to note, because this isn’t a chicken-or-the-egg scenario—the more orthodoxy you have, the more enforcement you tend to use (see also: being a Kansas City Royals fan and it being “our time.”)
I have always belonged to a non-creedal church—the Disciples of Christ. We famously bore the slogan, “No Creed but Christ!” and still insist on very few points of orthodoxy for our congregations beyond the following:
-Belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior
-Belief in the priesthood and ministry of all believers
-Practice of baptism by full immersion
-Practice of weekly holy communion
And that’s about it. Nothing in there about the Trinity, or heaven and hell, or pre-, post- a-, or pan-millennialism. Nothing about humanity’s inherent depravity, or even the nature of salvation.
What can I say? We’re not picky eaters. We want to make sure you're down with the essentials of being a Protestant Christian first before we worry about what kind of millennium you believe in ("Falcon" is an acceptable answer, at least in my church).
Except being a Disciple has made me picky in one way—I cannot, in good conscience, ever sign a statement of faith that went beyond the affirmation of Jesus as the Messiah, even if I agreed with everything that statement of faith said.
As Christian Piatt points out, Jesus didn’t ask any of His disciples to sign a statement of faith when they signed up.
But I’d go even further—Peter didn’t ask his audience at Pentecost to sign a statement of faith (like we may now do in church with prospective members) in order to be saved—Peter told them to be baptized so that they could receive forgiveness, not right doctrine!
So I'm not sure why I should proffer such a statement to the folks who visit my church. It simply does not come across as Biblical to me.
Like I said in my previous post, my church does have a short statement of faith on its website, and it is essentially the same as the short list I made at the start of this post. Our “essentials” for belief are quite minimal, and that is, in my mind, enough.
It is enough for two reasons—one is theological. I am a sola scriptura (“by Scripture alone”) Christian in that I believe that the Bible contains all the instruction necessary for salvation, so going above and beyond it in creating orthodoxy seems very much unnecessary to me.
The other reason is more practical—I simply worry that extensive statements of faith turn away people who are unchurched. Granted, this may well be patronizing for me to hypothesize (since I was raised in the church and have never really walked in an unchurched person’s proverbial shoes), and if it is, please call me out on it:
I can imagine that if I were unchurched, and looking for a church, and saw on their website, say, a four-page statement of faith with plenty of Christian-y jargon that I didn’t understand, I’d feel intimidated, much in the same way that I would feel intimidated if I traveled to a foreign country where I knew neither the language or the culture. I would imagine this may be especially the case for a person who is looking for community even more than they are looking for answers.
More to the point, I worry that churches are sacrificing doing ministry upon the altar of doctrinal purity, and that this single-minded focus on right thought—at the expense of right action—is destroying us as a faith. And by quickly reprimanding its nuns but dragging its feet over pedophile priests, the Catholic Church is perhaps the most powerful case study at what can go wrong when a church does end up prioritizing right thought over right action.
Because statements of faith necessarily bring up the question in the first place of how a church will enforce its orthodoxy. Private teaching and admonishment is one thing; public shaming and shunning is something else entirely, which is why I have had such objections to the way the American nuns are being treated. Even if the nuns are in doctrinal error, it feels like the Vatican is doling out a million-dollar fine for a ten-dollar crime, and the Vatican is having a hard time proving the crime at that (much less its severity).
So to churches considering amending their statements of faith, I would ask: how do you plan to enforce them?
In the end, I realize that orthodoxy must be defined, but I’m not exactly sure why it always must be defended so. Truth wins out by its inherent nature, and it doesn’t always need our flawed and sometimes narrow-minded attempts to go to bat for it. Sometimes it wins out on its own.
After all, one of Jesus’ disciples (Matthew) was a tax collector. Another (Simon) was a zealot. They were polar opposites. I could totally see some bureaucrat in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith demanding that one of them toe the doctrinal line to stay in their church.
But Jesus did no such thing.
And the Twelve remained intact, all the way up to Judas’s betrayal.
So…as Jesus said to us: do likewise.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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