Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the fourth of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here and the second post is here and the third here. If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.
Commentary on Paragraph 11
This is
the second of the two paragraphs which, in my view, have been assigned an
especially unhelpful heading in the officially published editions of the Basis. ‘Scholarly Interpreters’ has led
to a serious neglect of the full range of issues the paragraph raises. It
completely bypasses all “those who
have reflected deeply upon, and acted trustingly in obedience to, God’s living
Word”. It obscures the other witnesses specifically mentioned in this
paragraph: evangelists, prophets and martyrs. The actual theme that runs
through this paragraph is that of the various ministries which help the Church
to “confess the Lord in fresh words and deeds”. I think a
more appropriate heading would be ‘Contemporary Witnesses’.
At the
same time, to note the wider themes of the paragraph is not to gloss over the
significance of what is said about the ministry of scholarship. Research by
Andrew Dutney into the background to this paragraph has highlighted that the
commitment to scholarship was included to ensure that in learning from
Scripture, we did not limit ourselves to the example and insights of earlier
readers, specifically those of the Reformers who were mentioned in the previous
Paragraph.[i]
It emerged
out of a recognition that between the Reformation and the twentieth century,
there had been some immensely significant developments in the scholarly
engagement with Scripture. Many of these developments made serious claims upon
the church’s attention. Hence the second sentence of this paragraph and its
reference to the “inheritance of literary, historical and scientific enquiry”
of “recent centuries” and the note of gratitude that “God’s ways with
humanity…are open to an informed faith”.
Note the
location of scholarship. It is not the academy per se, but the church. What is imagined here is a ministry within
the church by those who seek to use their scholarship to help the church better
hear “God’s living Word”. The scholarship implied here is not that which begins
with the scepticism towards faith and religion characteristic of the secular
academy. Rather it is scholarship which begins with the expectations formed by
Christian convictions, specifically the Christological convictions that lie
behind the phrase ‘God’s living Word’. Take those convictions away, and the
meaning and significance of this paragraph is fundamentally distorted.
The
purpose of having an informed faith is not to convince ourselves that we’re
smart. Nor is it to claim that the intellectual challenges to Christian faith
can be easily overcome. At least one of the purposes of being informed about
our faith is that we “sharpen our understanding of the will and purpose of
God”. But this is not achieved merely by scholarship. This paragraph suggests
that such a sharpening of our understanding occurs “within a world-wide
fellowship of Churches” and “by contact with contemporary thought”. The
paragraph also suggests the relationship with contemporary societies will “help
[the Church] understand its own nature and mission”. These are striking and
important claims, but they are not novel.
Christian
thinkers have long recognised that there is insight and wisdom beyond the
church which have claims upon the church. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that whatever from the philosophers “which
happen[s] to be true and consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, but
be claimed for our own use, as it were from owners who have no right to them”.[ii] More charitably, John
Calvin (1509-1564) declared that if God “has willed that we be helped in
physics, dialectic mathematics and other like disciplines, by the work and
ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance.”[iii] And John Wesley
(1703-1791) produced, and continually revised, a Compendium of Natural Philosophy to help the Methodist community be
intellectually aware.
In this
process of ‘sharpening its understanding of the will and purpose of God’, the
Uniting Church relates itself to scholarship, the world-wide fellowship of
Churches, contemporary thought and contemporary societies. Perhaps the acute
challenge of this network of relationships is one which echoes what was
observed in the commentary on Paragraph 5. Today when we talk about the
‘worldwide fellowship of Churches’ we are acknowledging communities in Asia,
the Pacific and Africa which inhabit social, cultural, and intellectual worlds
significantly different from those of the West. The insights which they learn
from their contemporary societies and
their traditions of thought will add
to – and often be in tensions with – those which the Western Churches received
from the “literary, historical and scientific enquiry of recent centuries” in
the West.
It is also
from those contexts that we might be challenged to overcome our neglect of
evangelists, prophets and martyrs. It is an understatement to say that the
Uniting Church has been nervous about evangelism. Perhaps we need to let go of
our anxieties generated by the bad press which many styles of evangelism have
understandably generated. To embrace the task of evangelism is not to commit to
supposedly smart techniques with their frequent hints of manipulation. It might
well start, instead, with learning from the basic confidence in the gospel
which characterises so many of the Churches beyond those in the West.
Perhaps we
have not been entirely deaf to the witness of prophets, especially those who
have properly confronted us with our easy capitulation to materialism, our
preoccupation with property, our tolerance of patriarchy, and our complicity in
the colonialism which has wreaked havoc on Australia’s First Peoples. Prophets
discern when the church neglects or distorts the core claims of the faith, and
when it lives in outright denial of those claims. By their very nature,
prophets are irritating, idiosyncratic and frequently disruptive of the
church’s complacency. They and their message must, however, be heard.
To be
called to acknowledge the witness of martyrs often generates similar anxieties
as those associated with evangelism. In today’s world martyrdom easily conjures
up the fanaticism of a suicide bomber. It is also true that only a small
minority of Christians have been called to martyrdom. But those of us living in
Australia must pause and reflect on the fact that in many part of the world
today, notably the Middle East, some Christians are being martyred not because
they are fanatics, but simply because they are Christian. With their example
before us, we can only pray that we be ready “when occasion demands to confess
the Lord in fresh words and deeds.”
[i] See Dutney, Where Did the Joy Come From? 25-27.
[ii] Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 64
[iii] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol 1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles and
ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 275.
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