Today it was my pleasure and privilege to launch the latest book of my Pilgrim Theological College colleague and friend, John Flett, Apostolicity: The Ecumenical Question in World Christian Perspective (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016). The following is the text of my comments on the occasion. It was one of five books being launched at the University of Divinity's Learning and Teaching Day, so I had only five minutes available. So much more could be said about the book, but I hope even these brief remarks generate interest in what is a very important book.
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In 1959, the Joint Commission on Church Union, the body whose work led to the formation of the Uniting Church in Australia two decades later, published its first report. In it the Commission wrote this about apostolicity: “Succession in ministerial
order is good; succession in apostolic faith and life is essential.”
I have always been
encouraged by this contrast and have often used it as a springboard to defend a
concept of apostolicity not determined by ministerial order.
Apostolicity: The Ecumenical Question in World Christian
Perspective has, however, woken me from my apostolic slumber and made me realise that I wasn’t
being anywhere near as radical as I thought I was when affirming a an alternative
notion of apostolicity.
This book is the published
version of John’s Habilitationsshcrift which
he completed in Wuppertal in 2015. It
follows his earlier ground-breaking work on Missiology, The Witness of God, published in 2010.
John’s meticulous, broad-ranging
and impressively-documented argument confronted me with the fact that the
concept of apostolicity in which I had put such confidence was, firstly, a
reflection of a binary produced by Catholic/Protestant polemics and, secondly,
completely uninformed by the realities of world Christianity.
By ‘world Christianity’ John
means a polycentric, culturally plural and institutionally diverse communion. The
pluriformity of this communion does not simply represent accidental and diverse
manifestations of a stable universal.
Rather, this pluriformity is
itself of material theological significance. It informs an ongoing and dynamic view of apostolicity rather than
being measured for its faithfulness to some pre-existing definition of
apostolicity.
John threads various strands
of evidence and argument together to reach this position. There is a close
reading of key ecumenical documents beginning with the 1971 text, Apostolicity and Catholicity and
extending to the recent 2013 text, The Church: Towards a Common Vision.
There is a sustained
rejection of the idea of Christianity forming a fixed culture, a rejection that
is built around, to a large extent, a vigorous critique of Robert Jenson’s claim that there is. There is
also a fascinating political analysis of apostolicity when John brings
colonisation and apostolicity into dialogue.
John’s constructive argument
builds on, among many other elements, the cultural diversity and cross-cultural
encounter evident in the New Testament.
Above all, however, he
develops a Christology as that to which any concept of apostolicity must be
subordinate. He argues that Jesus Christ himself is the foundation of the plurality of apostolicity.
Let me illustrate some of
the strands of this argument with just a few quotations.
On the link often drawn
between the church’s visibility and the apostolic universality of its structures,
John writes as follows:
…isolating
the discussion of apostolicity from
cross-cultural engagement permits an abstraction of ecclesiology from the
concrete conditions of the church even whilst grounding the apology for that
abstraction within an account of the church as a continuous visible social
reality. A fundamental inconsistency is in play here. The logic of the
livedness of the church community, if rigorously applied, needs to account for
the richness of structures evident in world Christianity and by extension their
richness through Christian history. (p.101)
John refers to Bolaji
Idowu’s analysis of the Nigerian church and its deep sense of needing to become
Western in order to become Christian. This
leads John to reflect on the link between the ‘foreignness of Christianity’ and
the process of colonization – and the ecumenical movement’s apparent blindness
to this link.
It
is difficult to shake the conclusion that the dominant ecumenical model for
apostolicity, that of cultural continuity, mandates colonization as the method
of cross-cultural missionary transmission with all that this entails for uneven
power relationships, paternalism, building relationships of dependence and,
finally, maintaining a state of Christian infancy (p.181).
Finally, in a wonderful
chapter on the Christological foundation of apostolicity, John draws heavily on
the claim that the centre and identity of church lies outside of itself
precisely because its centre and identity is Jesus Christ. I quote:
The
church finds its identity beyond itself, in the history of Jesus Christ. In
this resides the possibility of conversion, the possibility of multiple
Christian histories (p.320).
…diversity
is a direct correlate of the apostolate’s Christological ground and calling –
not secondary or accidental, but part of the full stature of Jesus Christ’s
body (p.326).
This is a fine book. It is
bound to generate controversy – and so it should. The questions are pressing
ones and to neglect them would be to risk ignoring the challenges of world Christianity.
I hope, too, that this University,
drawing together different traditions with diverse understandings of
apostolicity, might also find ways to engage the issues which John raises. We
need to do so, I believe, as the Australian church inevitably find its own life
shaped to an ever greater degree by the polycentric and pluriform Christian
communion of which John writes so powerfully.
It is delight to have John
as a colleague and one who I’m sure, both through this book and the others
which will come, will provoke and encourage us in our faith and scholarship. I warmly
commend the book to all of you.
