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Searching for the Church

Searching for the Church

Last updated on: January 28, 2015 at 2:18 pm by Gene Veith

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Searching for the Church 2015-01-28T14:18:10-05:00 Gene Veith

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Patheos has a blog called The Evangelical Pulpit that posts a wide range of material and that you can actually contribute to. (I urge you to put together a submission if you have something pertinent to say.) One of my prized students, Nick Barden, has written a post about his search for a church and a theological tradition. And, more broadly, for the “church Catholic,” how the different traditions all fit together.

He treats Baptists, Pentecostals, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics, and is quite fair and illuminating about them all. He “gets” some important facets about Lutheranism, though perhaps not completely. I quote from his post after the jump, but you really need to read the whole thing from the beginning.

From Nick Barden, An Ecumenism of Brokenness at Evangelical Pulpit:

In this day and age, where the conversion from low to high church marks a sort of intellectual coming of age for that wide-eyed evangelical kid, encountering the riches of liturgy and Church history for the first time, it’s cool to point and laugh at the quaint naivete of our childhood church. But I think the criticism is often misplaced. We fall in love with the abstract form of whatever tradition we pursue, not realizing that all vices common to man must afflict us there too. The carefully chosen poetry of the liturgy, the immense significance of the sign of the cross, and the words of absolution and consecration are all meant to be enfleshed in a particular church body. I wonder how many of us can survive the jarring transition as the Word becomes flesh and dwells among little old ladies with outrageous hats, caterwauling infants, and cold, implacable parish priests.

I met Christ once in a small Presbyterian church – the halfway house between symbol and sacrament. The words “take, eat, this is my body” have a lot of power if you’re not insisting on Christ’s absence. There are two ways of looking at the sacrament, I suppose. One can see it charged with the presence of Christ, body meeting body in a tangible way. Or one can see it for the painful hiddenness of God, calling one’s gaze out of the world to the promise of eternity. Christ has ascended and is here with us, but can our minds hold the two propositions together at the same moment? Can we affirm and negate simultaneously? Or must we leave the duality scattered amidst a score of churches, and the same number of systematic theologies?

The shift from negation to affirmation is a veritable revolution, but not without cost. Where two or more Lutherans are gathered, there’s always a fifth. Sin boldly and go before the Cross boldly, Luther proclaimed, though I’m fairly certain you’ll only find the latter half of that statement in Scripture. Baptists have their purgatory in this life and Catholics want it in the hereafter. But for Lutherans, purgation has been accomplished by Christ, once and for all, and the world itself is baptized into his death – beautiful, broken, and shot through with the glory of Christ. “Your sins are forgiven,” this the Lutheran understands well. But it takes the Calvinist to drive the second part home – “go and sin no more.” . . .

The search for Catholicism is ultimately a search for an ecumenism of brokenness. “A distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all,” O’Connor says, and I suspect that it’s better than one of perfect clarity. The finite cannot contain the infinite, and though we’re all suspicious of any man who tries to fit the infinite in his head, we do not know how to take the finitude of the Church herself before an infinite God. Must she too see now through a glass darkly; then face to face?

But we Lutherans, responding to the Reformed polemic against us, insist that “the finite CAN contain the infinite”! Evidently, we Lutherans have created the impression that we are antinomians. Can someone explain to him Luther’s “sin boldly” comment?

[Go ahead and comment and discuss. But, fellow Lutherans, please do NOT attack this young man, as we are so wont to do when we encounter imperfect theology, which scares so many searchers like him away. I will delete any posts that do, even if you are friends of mine.]

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