Interminable delays

Well, they will have an end, so that was hyperbole. Nonetheless, I am likely to be away from my 'Net connection for the next three days or so. Will post on Chapter 5 as soon as I'm able--it's a meaty one.

Cheers,
PGE


UPDATE: Delays continue. Will try to post on Chapters 5 & 6 ASAP, but will be in Australia beginning tomorrow. I'm sorry to say my schedule is likely to be massively disrupted for the next month or so, between a trip to Australia and some pending surgery. PGE

Response to Doug--Chapter 4

You note, in response to Frame's list:

1. Denominationalism has greatly weakened church discipline. The hypothetical example he gives could be all too real. Without a sense of mutual belonging to a greater Body, or a shared vision of responsibility to that Body, such a situation could easily happen – and does. One could argue that sociological factors (such as our individualism, drive for growth uber alles, etc), also feed into this problem.

This is my personal vote for "number one problem of denominations." It is the same problem as comparison-shopping, really, as all of these amount to a replacement of submission with selection in our relationship to the church. (I'll get to your number one in a moment.)

In a previous post, I used a similar example, that of a church which remarries divorcees who were refused marriage by a neighboring church. I am still looking for the suggestion which improves on this situation; in any scenario I can foresee, the church with the popular view will simply assimilate the less popular, but more biblical, church--effectively annihilating the witness to that particular truth in that culture. We have to have more than "abolish denominations" in play, if we wish to avoid that; yet it is clear that the status quo, in which the adulterer can simply "shop around" until he finds a "tolerant" and "inclusive" church that "accepts" him and shows him "unconditional love," is unacceptable.

Now, as to your number-one problem with denominations, regarding the maldistribution of gifts in the Body (among the denominations):

The problem is that we’ve essentially divided the Body up by its functions, as Paul explicitly warned us in I Corinthians 12 NOT to do.

I basically agree, with a caveat insofar as I still think that God will give the local church what it needs. The question is, though, are we using everything He's given us? Or are we hiding and distorting certain things to fit our frameworks and distinguish ourselves from others?

I think there's something in that side of the critique, though, especially where the old "It takes evangelistic unction to make orthodoxy function" sort of problem crops up. I know that, as a non-Calvinist intellectual, it's frustrating to me to find myself compelled to consult Reformed, Catholic, or Orthodox sources for well-reasoned historical judgments about doctrine, while at the same time having to systematically disagree with key elements of their arguments. Where are the great dogmatists on "my side"? The sad answer is, virtually nonexistent. The temptation to "join the club" doctrinally in order to get in on the discourse is strong; the temptation to reject the discourse altogether so I "don't rock the boat" is, on the other hand, also strong. It's no wonder I've seen Christians from non-liturgical traditions running off to Rome or Antioch to replace that tension with "ours is the one, true church" pride.

Is the answer to create a "one, true church"--as Frame seems to think it is--though? You and I seem to agree it isn't. So how can we insure that our local churches are not suppressing the Lord's work in their members?

Chapter 4 -- Comparative Damages

[sorry for the delay. Uh, blame the heat. Or the busy weekend. Or Harry Potter. Or Trogdor the Burninator. Gotta blame it on somethin' . . .]

I am happy that Doug got the jump on me. His way of responding to a chapter makes a better lead-in than mine, and I hope he'll take advantage of my sloth to get in the last word, too. I'll use my response to Doug to get into the particulars, more.

I tend to, having read the text, choose some one piece to gnaw on (Doug digests, I ruminate). In this case, it's surprisingly tiny; I'm interested in the form of the argument encapsulated in his concluding remark for this chapter, and with what it may reveal about Frame's approach--and what we may have to deal with as we engage the topic further:

There may be other problems of denominationalism which I have not mentioned. But after this survey, can anyone seriously say that denominationalism does not cause practical problems for the church? Can anyone deny that there would be considerable benefits in abolishing denominations?

Let us assume that we answer Frame's first question with a resounding "No!" Does it follow that we must answer with the expected "No!" to the second?

I'd like to reframe (no pun intended, professor) the argument just a bit. In order to build a new multibillion dollar stadium, the city of Los Angeles has just bulldozed hundreds of old apartment buildings. Those apartment buildings included one that was an amazingly important architectural treasure (unlikely, but this is my hypothetical, OK?); they also included a number that had been "condemned" by way of suspicious fires set by shady fellows in zoot suits. Now, a mediocre sports team (let us say that Los Angeles just acquired, oh, the Astros) is holding forth in a very expensive stadium that barely pays the rent, while exacerbating the housing shortage.

Now, can anyone seriously say that this urban renewal project does not cause practical problems for the city? I should hope we would answer, "No!" And can anyone deny that there would be considerable benefits to demolishing the stadium?

Well, of course, we certainly could deny that. And we might be right. Especially if the stadium were demolished, say, by shady fellows in zoot suits dynamiting it in the night, leaving smoking rubble all over the place. Or terrorists nuking it during a game. Or even the city fathers deciding to raze the place in favor of a housing project (housing projects run by city governments being generally describable in terms of Dante's famous poem--and no, not the Paradiso).

In other words, we can admit that we arrived at the status quo in a bad way, for bad reasons, with bad results, and we may still be rightly convinced that merely abolishing the status quo conveys no benefits. The question is, "How can we do better?" and not merely, "When will we do something?"

And that is what Frame has yet to answer, and until he does so his belaboring the "bad, bad, bad" denominations is much like telling humans that aging is bad.

Sure it is. But what else can we do?

Response to Doug--Chapter 3

I guess it just *seemed* longer. Maybe if I expand my bullet points . . .

I think you tag the problem we're all stuck wrestling with at the tail end of your post this week:

Of course, from the ECUSA's perspective (and that of its mainline allies) it is "schismatic" - but when apostates call you schismatic, it ought to be seen as a badge of honor. And there are ten times as many Anglicans outside the white Western nations as there are Episcopalians left within them. Who, pray tell, are the real schismatics here?

"Will the real schismatics please stand up?"

"The real schismatic has left the building."

When the Apostle John wrote, "They went out from among us, that it may be seen that they were not of us," he was writing as an Apostle to a particular church or group of churches. When we come to decide among churches, without any apostles handy to do the judging, what can we hope for?

Of course I support the idea of the ECUSA being disfellowshipped. They are not only tolerating but promoting impenitent sin in their leadership--corruption is rarely so easy to identify. By "disfellowshipped," though, what do I mean? Should we reject any member of an ECUSA church as a communicant in our churches?

I think that we'll have to get a lot better at handling church discipline in our local churches before we'll be ready to do more than case-by-case judgment in these matters.

I'm very interested in what's going on with your AMiA church, Doug. Do keep bringing that in. From time to time, I may draw on my church here in Japan for examples, too.

"Schism? Who needs another -ism?"

What to say? Chapter 3 (and a post that may be longer than it)

I'm having a hard time deciding what to say about chapter 3. I can only assume Frame conceived of this as a transition between sections, because it's rather light on substance. Nonetheless, I'll try to chew on what I can. Here's the broad statement that would best summarize the chapter, I think:

We need an ecclesiology that makes some careful distinctions between the attributes, powers and gifts of the church, on the one hand, and those of particular denominations, on the other. We should no longer develop doctrines of the church which are written as if the schisms had never taken place, or as if we were still living before A.D. 451.

I guess it must be my Independent Baptist background, but I'm initially inclined to react to this by saying, "Of course. Who does that? Oh, wait, you're *Presbyterian*. Got it."

That is, it's true. It's dead obvious, in fact. Which is why it's so stunning that the church as a whole hasn't quite glommed on to it yet.

At the same time, independent or "free church" ecclesiology has been grappling with this for centuries, now, sometimes more successfully than others. Taking Frame at his word that (a) denominations should be de-privileged and (b) ecclesiology should not pretend that the church functions now in the manner it might have functioned in some alternate, schism-free reality, I would arrive at the following basic teachings:

• 1) there are churches, and there is the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."
• 2) in Christ, all of the local bodies *are* one Body.
• 3) in the world, the Body *exists as* many local bodies. (that is, there *is no* magisterium)
• 4) the test of membership in the Body of Christ is confessed faith in Christ, baptism, and submission to the discipline of some local church.
• 5) the local body should only have as members those who are members of the Body.

Among the implications of these teachings would be:

• 6) members in good standing of any local body are also in communion with any other local body.
• 7) members who reject the discipline of one local body should not be received by another.
• 8) impenitence in the face of church discipline for sinful behavior would be one sort of rejection of discipline; impenitence in the face of church discipline for false teaching would be another.

However, there arises the complicating factor which seems to give rise to Frame's difficulty in analyzing the various Protestant splits in Chapter 2:

• 9) local bodies which pervert the Gospel, baptize unbelievers, or discipline falsely compel those they excommunicate to sin in remaining outside the church or to join other local bodies.
• 10) local bodies which pervert the Gospel, baptize unbelievers, or discipline falsely compel other local bodies to evaluate whether the prospective members or the church they left are schismatic.

Now, given these "givens" it may seem that we must either throw up our hands in despair and embrace both members of our church (before one can leave), or erect a hierarchy which can, by some measure of worldly force (whether financial, social, or political) settle all cases which arrive at stage (9&10). I think, however, that this is premature. If we accept that unity is a positive good in the church, albeit (as I still think) a secondary one, a fruit of first-order goods such as love for the brethren and devotion to the Gospel's spread, then the above could be viewed as a *negative test* for necessary division. That is, when we look at the believers and the churches around us--when it comes to cases--do we, in fact, see that the divisions which exist are based on points 9 & 10? Are they *currently* so, even if they may have been *historically* so at some time?

Many times, I think our answer will be "no." And where that is the case, it is not "compromise" in any shameful sense to encourage one body to reach out to another. This is the great failure of the sort of Independent Baptist churches I grew up in, methinks: they fail to treat the above as *negative tests*, and instead require that churches affirmatively demonstrate that they are "of like faith and practice" before they will interact fruitfully with them or receive their members. This is a defensive reaction typical of separatists, who are always a hair's breadth away from being properly schismatic (I disagree that independent churches are schismatic for leaving a denomination, on grounds Frame should approve: that denominations have no spiritual authority) and have often, and egregiously, crossed right over it. That Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other denominationalists have done no better in no way excuses those who have done bad enough.

I suggest that the way out is not, as Frame's Presbyterian commitments lead him to expect, through a unity-building hierarchy; rather, it is through a revival of love for the brethren and zeal for the Gospel in our local churches, coupled with a thorough de-privileging of denominations. Can that be? On a grand scale, probably not.

In your church? Well, have you tried? Have I? What would it look like if we did?